ARCHAEOLOGY
catalogues some intriguing coin finds from Australia, Utah and England
In the past six years, archaeologist Mike Hermes and other academics have mounted seven expeditions off the coast of northern Australia, finding previously undiscovered rock art, shipwrecks and stone tools. On a field trip to the Wessel Islands, off northeast Arnhem Land in July 2018, Hermes found a coin he believes comes from the Kilwa sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin on an island off Tanzania in East Africa, and dating from before 1400. Its surface is eroded, obscuring identifying features, but Hermes is confident. “We’ve weighed and measured it, and it’s pretty much a dead ringer for a Kilwa coin,” he said. It was lying in the intertidal zone off Elcho Island. Kilwa once was a flourishing trade port with links to India in the 13th to 16th century. Kilwa’s copper coins were the first coins ever produced in sub-Saharan Africa.
Back in 1944, Maurie Isenberg, an RAAF radar operator stationed briefly on nearby Marchinbar Island, discovered five Kilwa coins while sitting in the sand with his fishing rod. In 1979 he rediscovered the coins stashed away in a tin, and handed them over to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. The coins, dating from the 10th to the 14th century, were apparently forgotten again until anthropologist Ian McIntosh got the ball rolling in 2013 when he led an expedition to the Wessel Islands that failed to unearth any more coins. The latest coin find is 100 miles (160km) from where Isenberg claimed to have found his. Outside Africa, Kilwa coins have only been found in Oman and the Wessel Islands. “It’s a puzzling distribution,” said Hermes.
Historian Mike Owen said the coins could indicate contact between Aboriginal Australians and traders from Kilwa 700 years ago. The Wessel Islands were probably not the intended destination for the coins. There was trade between Kilwa and China, and possibly those traders were blown off course or escaping from pirates. Perhaps there was a shipwreck. But Owen said the most likely scenario is that the Portuguese,
who looted Kilwa in 1505, went on to set foot on Australian shores, bringing the coins with them. “The Portuguese were in Timor in 1514, 1515 – to think they didn’t go three more days east with the monsoon wind is ludicrous,” said Hermes. theguardian.com, 11 May; news.com.au, 14 May 2019.
Two Spanish coins (above), one from the 13th century and the other a 16 Maravedí of Philip IV minted in Madrid in 1662/63, were found by a hiker on the desert floor near the Halls Crossing Marina on Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah. The first Europeans recorded in Utah are the Spanish expedition of 1765 led by explorer Juan Antonio de Rivera. He claimed the area for Spain and found the Colorado river. Then in 1776, Franciscan priests led by Father Atanasio Dominguez and Father Silvestre Velez de Escalante came through as they tried to find a route from Santa Fe to California, and then came back after their trip was unsuccessful.
The coins may have been imported from Europe by early Spanish settlers or explorers, traded with native American tribes, possibly in Mexico, and then lost in the canyon; however, the great disparity in age between the coins indicates they didn’t circulate at the same time and may have been dropped by a coin collector. “This is not necessarily as unlikely as it sounds,” said Dr Rory Naismith, lecturer in mediaeval British history at King’s College London. “A 19th-century shipwreck off the south coast of England was found to be full of ancient and mediaeval coins from the Mediterranean. Old coins were also a
favoured souvenir for soldiers returning from the Middle East in the two World Wars.” dailymail.com, 9 May 2019.
An “incredibly rare” coin has been found in a ditch at a small Roman farmstead during a dig as part of Highways England’s £1.5bn scheme to improve the A14 between Cambridge and Huntingdon. It depicts Ulpius Cornelius Laelianus, who reigned for about two months in AD 269 before being killed, probably by his own soldiers. It was only the second coin of its kind to be unearthed in England. The ill-fated emperor sized power and ruled a breakaway territory in what is now Germany and France. Another unusual coin discovered during the dig was a Gallic War uniface coin, minted in 57 BC by the Ambiani tribe in the Somme area of modern-day France. Experts speculate it was exported to help fund the British Celtic resistance to Julius Caesar. BBC News, 18 May 2019.
A seventh century counterfeit of a gold Merovingian tremissis (below), originally minted in Dorestad in the Netherlands between AD 630 and 650, was found by a detectorist in a ploughed field near Woodbridge in Suffolk in 2016. Both obverse and reverse have what numismatists called “blundered legends” (inscriptions spelt wrongly). The coin was probably used for jewellery, as it had been pierced and there was a general lack of wear. It is about 0.3g lighter than the real thing and was probably made in the decades after 650 (a generation after the Sutton Hoo ship burial nearby). BBC News, 31 Mar 2019.