Celtic Hoard Found in Netherlands

[Adsos Letter]

Source: NumisMaster.com

By Richard Giedroyc, World Coin News
January 26, 2009

Coins are often used as "index fossils" by archaeologists. An index fossil is a fossil with which paleontologists are familiar that is also known to have lived during a specific time period and in a certain environment. For this reason an index fossil can help date an entire paleontological dig site. Coins found at archaeological dig sites can often help date the site, identify past trade routes, identify rulers, suggest political borders, and even suggest the level of technology available in the area. Due to inscriptions and iconography coins are often the only artifact found at an archaeological site that can "speak" to us.

On Nov. 13 an important find of 109 Celtic coins of the Eburones tribe found in the Netherlands was announced through the Associated Press. According to AP information, this is one of three important hoard finds of coins issued by this tribe. The other two finds, according to AP information, were discovered in Belgium and Germany in areas not too distant geographically from the Netherlands.

The most recent find was discovered by metal detector hobbyist Paul Curfs, who was sweeping a corn field in Maastricht, a city in the southern part of the Netherlands. Curfs is not a coin collector. He discovered the coins in the spring of 2008. The find is only now being announced publicly.

In the AP story Curfs described his find of the first coin, saying: "It was golden and had a little horse on it - I had no idea what I had found."

Curfs posted an image of the gold coin on the Internet on what is described as a web forum. Someone advised him the coin was rare. This prompted Curfs to return to the same field, where he next discovered a coin he described as, "It looked totally different - silver, and saucer-shaped."

By the time Curfs and several fellow hobbyists were done they had uncovered a total of 39 gold and 70 silver ancient Celtic coins. Curfs notified Maastricht city officials of the discovery, then worked with professional archaeologists to investigate the find site further.

http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=6064

[leftstreet]

1. Interesting!

Roymans believes the gold and silver coin hoard recently found in the Netherlands were produced by Celtic tribes further north, suggesting in his opinion the coins may represent cooperation among the various Celtic tribes in the war against Caesar's Roman legions. Roymans disclosed that both the gold and silver coins depict triple spirals on the obverse, a common Celtic symbol.

Thanks for posting.
:hi:

[Adsos Letter]

2. And thank you for taking the time to post the picture!

:hi:

[Mojorabbit]

3. I love this kind of thing

It is like finding letters from the past.

[Adsos Letter]

4. It is the same sensation I get when I find an arrowhead while out hiking...

holding something that someone else crafted hundreds, or even thousands of years ago. :hi:

[DeschutesRiver]

7. I hike out from my back door every day (except like now, snow and single digit temps!)

During the winter of course, I find nothing due to the snow, but during my daily summer hikes across our ranch, I will find an arrowhead (many with damaged tips, not as many perfect ones, but of every color and hue of obsidian), or a chunk of flaked obsidian, or multiple small chips almost every other day out there. Also various scrapers made from stone, and some colorful ones from the jaspar outcroppings here. I can instantly tell how they were held, because my thumb fits right into a small soft notch. They are soft and smoothly worn - the scraper just feels like it was crafted to be held by my hand.

I get that same sensation every single time I look down, see the arrowhead and put it in my hand to marvel that it has made its way to the surface after hundreds or thousands of years of travel. I mean, I go ga-ga over this kind of thing. Found a 4"+ obsidian spear once and almost passed out from the wonder of seeing and holding it:) Found a basalt arrowhead once as well, not as common here.

Thanks to the OP for this thread and for the pictures!

[Adsos Letter]

9. There were numerous tribal groups living in our valley...

and they do a lot of plowing, so walking the field, or along the streams, proves a rich source of artifacts.

I have found many points, two hand-axes, scrapers, drills, knives, (all from black obsidian), some mortars and pestals, a couple of plummets.

The find that was most exciting happened when I used to deer hunt up in the Siskiyous. I was walking up a shale ridge which seemed perfect for deer. I stopped for a standing breather, glanced down, and there, right between my feet, was a gorgeous 3" arrow point, with the tails intact. It looked a lot like this one, only in a beautifully marbled serpentine green & black:



I was really in awe, because i realized that someone hudreds or even thousands of years ago was probably hunting deer along that very same slope.

I gave it to a nephew as a keepsake and his mother, who despite all her sterling qualities has no appreciation of such things, threw it away when cleaning out his messy room. :cry:

[DeschutesRiver]

13. That is cool!

Ouch, that it was tossed - of course, maybe it will make its way through a landfill and be found by someone else a hundred years from now:)

I think we are living on a summer camp ground of sorts - several large spots here have hundreds of chips from the flintknapping they did to make them, along with what I think are their "mistakes", ones with points, sides, tails or the notches chipped off, likely tossed away due to flaking error. Even within the various shapes/types, there is enough variance that looking at them is like looking at individual signatures. I think finding the lone arrowhead out away from everything is more cool, because it connects you with a single event in someone's life from a time you can barely imagine, they had the same goal as you, and they stood pretty much on the same spot, and you now get to know that with certainty.

I'd like to find other things, like axes and mortars/pestals; if they camped here yearly, they must be here. I may not be recognizing what I am seeing - took me awhile to figure out some of the less fancy scrappers, etc.

In this photo, the spear I found is like the one on the far right:



We are in Central Oregon - don't know if you've heard of Glass Butte (Obsidian Butte), which is close to us but a bit more east. Natives used to come from all over to get obsidian from the butte - GB obsidian arrows/tools have been discovered all across the country. Still legal to collect there, and it is a big draw for knap-ins to meet there annually because of the quantity and amazing variety of different colored obsidians. I found a mostly intact red mahogany arrowhead here on the ranch, plus chunks, chips and arrowheads made of the midnight lace, colors you can find at GB. This link talks about GB, with pictures of red mahogany and midnight lace. Back when I found them, I had no clue that there were colors other than black! You have to hold the midnight up to the light to see the striping.

http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/education/facts/obsidian.html

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

5. Amazing. Thanks for posting.

I'm always surprised that even today people are still coming across ancient coin hoards.

[Adsos Letter]

6. What amazes me is what a small percentage of known archaeological sites...

have actually be excavated...the percentage is quite small. So much information and insight still hidden from view. :cry:

[Tsiyu]

15. Here they flooded a lot of sites

And WalMart and other Corps have decimated known sites. It's sad. People lived here for thousands of years and we know next to nothing about them.

Easier for the historians to treat them more as animals than human so Manifest Destiny seems oh-so-squeaky-clean.

[starroute]

8. Metal detector hobbyists are making a lot of finds

I sometimes get the impression that half the people in the British Isles spend their weekends criss-crossing the local fields with metal detectors. It's clearly not really that many -- but there are certainly a lot of them, and there are new finds on a regular basis. There are more of those stories in the summer than in the winter, of course, but here's a recent one about a hoard of gold coins found in England:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/7835228.stm

[Adsos Letter]

10. Yes, I posted on that story; very cool find! It does seem...

as if the metal detecting enthusiasm is strong in Britain. And the government has a pretty reasonable policy about rewarding the finders, even if the findings are claimed by the government.

[DCKit]

11. Al Qaeda, and now the Celtic horde.

We just can't catch a break.

Man the battlements!!!

[foxfeet]

12. I love this stuff! Thanks to all who posted. nt

[slackmaster]

14. Dang, I read "Celtic Head Found in Netherlands"

And was expecting some heavily tanned bog dude or something.

[SoxFan]

16. They found a bunch of these

Seventeen, if I'm not mistaken