DIGITAL CELTIC COIN INDEX LAUNCHED

The University of Oxford’s School of Archaeology has announced the launch of the Celtic Coin Index Digital (CCID) website, an online archive that provides access to the world’s largest dataset of Iron Age coins in Britain.

The Celtic Coin Index (CCI) has been housed in the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford since 1964 and now holds nearly

85,000 records of around 68,000 specimens of Iron Age coins; now the new digital resource means these cards and some of their related images and data are available online.

Iron Age coins were produced and used from around the early to mid-2nd century BC through the 1st century AD. They provide the first written evidence from Britain and mark the end of its ‘prehistory’. These coins are mainly found in southern and eastern England and are a major source of information on society, trade, religious beliefs, and continental contacts, forming a crucial part of the archaeological record for Iron Age Britain.

The CCID uses stable numismatic identifiers and linked open data methodologies established by the Nomisma.org project, which enables this digital collection to be linked to other coin databases across the globe through the related website Iron Age Coins in Britain (IACB). The digital version of the CCID will be useful for a range of interests, from finds identification to academic research.

The project to digitise CCI and create the CCID using the Numishare platform and Nomisma.org ontology was undertaken by a team at the University of Oxford, supported financially by the Royal Numismatic Society, the British Numismatic Society, the University of Oxford Barclay Head Fund, and private donors.

Find out more at: cci.arch.ox.ac.uk