Britain's Last Roman Hoards: Wealth, Power and Culture in the Fifth Century

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'Some they hid in the earth...and some they carried away' declares the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one of England's early medieval texts. It tells the story of what happened to precious hoards of treasure when Britain's Roman rulers abandoned the island in the early fifth century. Surprisingly, these Roman hoards do exist and are one of the most fascinating and important survivals of the period, 'hid in the earth', and never recovered by their owners. Of the 250+ recorded examples, around half survive today. They can be found in museum collections across the UK and are the subject of our research project. The hoards provide crucial evidence for the late Roman to early medieval transition period in Britain (end 4th to mid-late 5th century). In general, few objects survive from this time. Because it was a period of political and economic crisis, there was a dramatic drop in the availability of many goods and so we have much less artefact evidence than we do for other periods. It makes the hoards especially important: collectively, they contain thousands of coins, and hundreds of other artefacts. Their study has the potential to transform our understanding of this time- a potential not realised until now.Remarkably, these last Roman hoards from Britain are neglected in scholarly research. Many are unpublished or only partly published; others need re-evaluation. Most of the hoards include Roman silver coins, and/or items of precious jewellery and sometimes their burial containers are preserved. The non-coin artefacts from the hoards have been overlooked, especially the containers, which are virtually unstudied. There is also scope for fresh study of the coins. In this collaborative project we study the hoards as complete assemblages, bringing together a team of scholars who specialise in researching the different types of material. The research makes use of methods including close observation and recording of the objects, scientific analysis of their metal composition, and multivariate analysis to evaluate patterns in the data. Our project will establish new dating for the hoards that will help us understand the breakdown of the monetary system in Britain and how coins were used in this crucial transition period. Study of the non-coin artefacts from the hoards will help with dating by providing independent evidence, as well as wider data to evaluate questions of wealth, power and culture in the 5th century. We also need a new approach to the interpretation of Roman hoards. The principal debate among scholars, on why hoards were buried in the ground, has become stale. To revitalise the topic, we shift the focus of research away from the reasons for deposition. Instead, we examine how these artefacts and assemblages functioned more widely before burial, in end-4th and 5th-century society, and what they tell us about it. A key goal is to consider the individual and collective uses of artefacts from treasure collections in economic (and other) exchange. Who were the individuals and groups in society wealthy enough to collect these treasures, and what were their purposes? What do the individual objects and collective assemblages tell us about people's wealth and power, their daily lives, the survival of craft practices after the political and economic collapse of Roman Britain, and cultural connections between Britain and places beyond? To give an example of the potential, the Principal Investigator's initial research on a hoard from Thetford suggests it was buried not in the last decades of the 4th century, but towards the mid-5th century, much later than previously thought, and long after the end of Roman rule in Britain. Such a late date for this apparently 'Roman' hoard has profound implications for our understanding of 5th-century Britain. It means we need to re-evaluate both our evidence base for the period, and established thinking about the transition between Roman state collapse and the development of early medieval kingdoms.