Sunday, October 23, 2005

Golden land for finding Roman treasure

MORE Roman gold is found in Britain than anywhere else - and now a Welsh academic has come up with an intriguing theory explaining why.

Thousands of gold and silver artifacts from the Roman period, especially when the conquerors finally left these islands in the 4th and 5th centuries.

Dr Peter Guest, of Cardiff University's School of History and Archaeology, is the leading expert on the biggest ever Roman gold treasure discovered in Britain. In 1992, 15,000 gold and silver coins were found at Hoxne in Suffolk in 1992.


What he's proposing is that round about AD 400 the Romans left Britain and the inhabitants basically buried all their valuable stuff to keep it from falling into the hands of German invaders. Seems plausible, but this is out of our league so we don't really know how accurate the dating, quantities, etc. is.