One of the activities in the Heritage Lottery funded Beau
Street Hoard Project is photography of the hoard, by members of local U3A
groups.
In order that the coins can be identified, they are first
being accessioned in to the Roman Baths Museum collection. This includes
individually packing each coin identified by the British Museum, and assigning
it a unique number. As every one of the 17,577 coins in the hoard need an
individual number, this is a somewhat daunting task, currently being carried
out by a wide range of our collections volunteers (all 13 of them) and
placements.
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| All 775 coins from Bag 5 individually numbered and stored |
Once individually packed and numbered, the next stage in the
process is the photography and weighing of the coins. It is for this stage of
work, which we have enlisted the help of U3A volunteers.
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| U3A volunteers photographing and weighing the coins |
In teams of three, they are photographing the coins;
including the accession number, for identification purposes, the obverse
(heads) side, and the reverse (tails) side. Along the way they are having, to
get used to identifying the images on either side of the coin, so that each
photograph accurately displays the coin.
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| Three images are taken for every coin |
Once photographed, they are also weighing the coins, the
recording of this information being crucial to identifying coins.
To date, 3229 coins have been photographed and weighed. This
includes the entirety of Bags 5, 6, 7 and 8. The contents of these four bags are
a good representation of coins from the hoard, denarii, radiates and debased
radiates.
Bags 5 and 6 are the best examples of silver coins from the
hoard, so they were nice coins to get the U3A started on, however, it wasn’t
long before they had to move on to doing the considerably less shiny coins from
Bags 7 and 8, and they are doing a sterling job in photography what are some rather
nasty coins.
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| Some rather nasty coins from Bag 7 |
The rate at which the coins are being photographed and the
speed at which the U3A volunteers are learning to recognise the reverses of
coins has been unprecedented, and so work on Bag 2 has already started while we
have other volunteers working through getting the rest of it numbered.
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| Bag 2 all bagged up and waiting to be numbered |
With work soon to recommence on getting the rest of the
hoard identified at the British Museum, it hopefully won’t be long until we are
working our way through the rest of the hoard too!
Verity
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