Jersey "Le Catillon 2" hoard stratigraphy

Coriosolite stater, Series X, group b, coin 6

mint site: east of the River Rance, Brittany

Very few photographs of the recent Jersey hoard coins have yet been made available to the numismatic community, but already, the nature of the hoard appears to confirm the theory I developed more than twenty years ago that the Jersey hoards of Celtic coins are secondary hoards. I use the latter term to describe hoards that consist of groups of coins gathered from diverse locations that had either been stored above ground or previously buried.
The profile of such hoards is easy to recognize if you understand the issues (series) and their internal chronology: each series has a peak in the numbers of coins within the hoard that reveal the relative time they were gathered together and something of the location where this happened. The previous failure to understand the three series as products of different mints occluded their distribution patterns until I reclassified the coinage. The major reattribution was the dominant type in the Jersey hoards formerly given as Class II Coriosolite, but in my new classification as the issue of Viridovix of the Unelli in Normandy (John Hooker, Notes on part of the Le Catillon Hoard purchased by the Société Jersiaise in 1989, Société Jersiaise Annual Bulletin for 1993, p. 113-115)

The hoards from Brittany most resemble Gallic War refugee hoards: they are much smaller hoards and the peaks in Series X and Y are more closely aligned than in the Jersey hoards. The Jersey hoards are what I have called "recycling hoards", that is, coins and other material gathered for eventual reprocessing to extract the silver. Jersey was picked as a repository for such coins as Roman ships would have had difficulty landing on Jersey because of shallows, sand bars etc. (pers. comm. Douglas Corbel, Société Jersiaise). It is important to realize that these coins were minted to finance battles with Caesar's troops and no small-market monetary economy existed before or shortly after these coins were struck. After the war, the coins had no function apart from the intrinsic value of the alloy. Colin Haselgrove thinks that the Jersey hoards were deposited sometime in the third quarter of the first century BC, but I maintain that the last hoards would have been contemporary with the Roman destruction of the Coriosolite port at Alet and also with the eventual absence of silver in British Durotriges coinage (Coriosolite coins and billon ingots have been found at Hengistbury Head). In other words, circa 10-20 AD. We both have good reasons for our attributions that are based on different factors.

There are two photographs that show stratigraphy evidence. The first of these is shown here and appears on this blog. I think that these coins were the very first of the hoard found (which was reported as containing a gold coin). The gold coin in the photograph is a "bullet" stater of the Senones to which I would agree with Haselgrove's date of 200-125 BC. This coin must have been an heirloom when it was buried. To the left of the Senones stater is a billon stater variously attributed to the Veneti or a Veneti/Coriosolite Group a "hybrid". some of the confusion over these early billon issues is due to, perhaps, that the same die cutter was employed by different issuers, Coriosolite, Series Xn (formerly Abrincatui) and Veneti. The latter is not as clear to me as the former two. Series Xn is a mess: some dies were reused later after they had been badly damaged and the die links are all over the place. This makes aligning typology and metrology rather tricky. Most of the rest of the coins in the photograph are very rare in the Jersey hoards. These are the coins of Series X, group b (see illustration above). I see eight examples that are certainly group b, but there could be more. The coin to the right of the Senones stater is only partly visible and could be either group c or d. No later coins of Series X (e to g) are to be seen in the photo. By way of comparison, the first Le Catillon hoard contained only 1.7% of the coins of groups b to d (formerly Class V). The commonest type in the big Jersey hoards is Series Z (Viridovix) and is represented by more than 50% in each hoard. Yet, in this photograph, only one Series Z is visible (the oval shaped obverse at the bottom near the right hand corner which only shows the head down to the eyebrow). There are also a couple of quarter staters contemporary with the Coriosolite staters in the photo. If I had seen this group described as a complete hoard I would have said that it probably would have been found in the same general area as the Merdrignac hoard from Brittany.

The other photograph is a complete contrast: mostly Series Y (mint site west of the River Rance) and especially group L, they represent a very small part of the chronology. These coins are more difficult to see and I had to enlarge the photo by several 10% increments in order to get a larger image in decent resolution.

The stratigraphy apparent here is obviously not representative of the other Jersey hoards and we most likely will find other areas where the stratigraphy points to discrete "parcels" within the hoard. Only when the complete hoard is disassembled and properly catalogued will the percentages of each group be fully known, but a cross section might give us some idea of the hoard's complete contents.

Although Jersey does not have a very good record of publishing photographs and providing catalogues of the previous hoards, and many thousands of Coriosolite coins were stolen from the museum and never recovered (I worked with Interpol on that case), This hoard is recent and they will, hopefully, share the photographs with the public along the lines of the British Museum's web site which allows scholars to post photos for non-profit, educational use. The Wikimedia images are all of uncleaned coins and useless for typological studies.

Great care must be taken with the analysis of the "parcels"within the hoard and with the organic/mineral residues on and around the coins in each parcel. It is even possible that a 2,000 year old itinerary might be reconstructed, but just one or two mistakes could negate that possibility.