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

“有的藏在土里……《盎格鲁-撒克逊编年史》是英国中世纪早期的文献之一。它讲述了英国罗马统治者在五世纪初遗弃这座岛屿时，珍贵的宝藏发生了什么。令人惊讶的是，这些罗马宝藏确实存在，而且是这一时期最令人着迷和最重要的遗迹之一，“隐藏在地下”，从未被它们的主人找到。在250多个有记录的例子中，大约有一半存活至今。它们可以在英国各地的博物馆收藏中找到，也是我们研究项目的主题。这些宝藏为英国从罗马晚期到中世纪早期（4世纪末到5世纪中后期）的过渡时期提供了重要证据。一般来说，很少有物品能从这个时期保存下来。因为那是一个政治和经济危机的时期，许多商品的可用性急剧下降，所以我们拥有的人工证据比其他时期少得多。这使得这些宝藏尤为重要：它们总共包含了数千枚硬币和数百件其他文物。他们的研究有可能改变我们对这一时期的理解——直到现在才意识到这一潜力。值得注意的是，这些来自英国的最后一批罗马宝藏在学术研究中被忽视了。许多未出版或只部分出版；其他的需要重新评估。大多数藏品包括罗马银币和/或珍贵的珠宝，有时它们的埋葬容器也被保存下来。储藏室里的非硬币文物一直被忽视，尤其是容器，几乎没有人研究过。对这些硬币进行新的研究也有很大的空间。在这个合作项目中，我们汇集了一个专门研究不同类型材料的学者团队，将这些藏品作为完整的组合进行研究。该研究使用了近距离观察和记录物体，科学分析其金属成分以及多变量分析等方法来评估数据中的模式。我们的项目将为这些储备建立新的年代，这将有助于我们了解英国货币体系的崩溃，以及硬币在这个关键的过渡时期是如何使用的。对这些非硬币文物的研究将通过提供独立的证据，以及更广泛的数据来评估5世纪的财富、权力和文化问题，从而有助于确定年代。我们还需要一种新的方法来解释罗马人的囤积。学者之间的主要争论是，为什么要把财宝埋在地下，这个问题已经过时了。为了使这个话题重新焕发活力，我们将研究的重点从沉积的原因上转移开来。相反，我们研究这些人工制品和组合物在埋葬前，在4世纪末和5世纪的社会中如何更广泛地发挥作用，以及它们告诉我们什么。一个关键的目标是考虑在经济（和其他）交换中个人和集体使用宝藏收藏中的人工制品。谁是社会中富有到足以收集这些宝藏的个人和群体，他们的目的是什么？关于人们的财富和权力，他们的日常生活，罗马不列颠政治和经济崩溃后手工艺实践的生存，以及英国与其他地方之间的文化联系，这些单独的物品和集体的集合告诉了我们什么？为了给出一个潜在的例子，首席研究员对来自塞特福德的一个窖藏的初步研究表明，它不是在4世纪的最后几十年被埋葬的，而是在5世纪中期，比之前认为的要晚得多，而且在罗马统治结束后很久。这个明显是“罗马”窖藏的年代如此之晚，对我们了解5世纪的不列颠有着深远的影响。这意味着我们需要重新评估这一时期的证据基础，以及关于罗马国家崩溃和中世纪早期王国发展之间过渡的既定思维。

'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.