The Coins of Fishbourne

Greg Campbell, who volunteers within the curatorial team at Fishbourne Roman Palace, has in recent months been helping digitise the coin collection at the site. As he explains, it was time very well spent…

Volunteers can get involved in all areas of a museum. One of them – me – has snapped a high-resolution photograph of the obverse and reverse (front and back, face-side and motif-side) of all 641 coins within the collections of Fishbourne Roman Palace. This includes the ones usually on display in the Palace Museum. The images have then been linked to the coin entries in the digital catalogue (‘Modes’ to the cognoscenti).

The photography followed on from a long campaign to conserve the coins from corroding carried out by the volunteer conservator Jacqui Watson.

Photos are a good way of recording which coin is which and examining a coin without subjecting it to wear and tear. And they are easier to send to outside specialists instead of the specialist coming to Fishbourne. But previously only a handful of coins had photographs, and these were low-resolution preconservation shots.

Some experimentation was needed to get good-quality coinmugshots. Eventually each coin was supported on an empty glass photo-frame, backlit by a slideviewer/lightbox, and front-lit by flash with an A4 paper sheet as diffuser, using a dSLR camera and macro lens in a table-top document-copying mount.

Thanks are due to Becky Stumpe for extracting the definitive list of coins from Modes as part of her Bournemouth University internship, and especially to Mary Haskins for contributing the new camera and macro lens in memory of her husband Dr Nev Haskins.

Almost all the coins are copperalloy (archaeological term for brass or bronze) with only one of gold (Fig 1) and 66 of silver (Fig 2).

As you would expect for coins that have been used, few are pristine (Fig 3); some are worn down to almost unrecognisable disks.

Not all the coins were Roman: a couple are the irregular ‘handmade’ disk with the swirling designs of the pre-Roman Iron Age (Fig 4), so old that they may have worked more as medals or badges of office than money. Some were pennies of the Middle Ages (Fig 5) and quite a few were Georgian or Victorian, including an 1864 4-Doubles from Guernsey.

All the coins are now conserved and safely back in Sensitive Objects store in the Collections Discovery Centre or back on display in the Palace Museum.

A couple of dozen coins are no longer associated with their original identifying numbers; these will need re-describing by a numismatist, and their descriptions marrying with their descriptions in the digital catalogue.

In the meantime, having reexamined all the marine shells from Fishbourne (his day-job) and photographed all the objects made from bone, this volunteer is quietly re-packaging all Fishbourne’s copper-alloy objects.