Le Câtillon II - the world’s largest Celtic coin hoard

In the latest 'Small Island Big Stories' episode, hosts  Mel and Perry are digging into the story about Le Câtillon II - the world’s largest Celtic coin hoard.  

Discovered in 2012 y by two local metal detectorists. This hoard surprised us all with its sheer size in contents.

Neil Mahrer,  Jersey Heritage's Conservator, shares his experiences of working with the hoard and the artifacts found within. 

If you've been inspired to find out more, then visit the  exhibition, ‘Searching for Jersey’s Celts’ is a story about the  Le Câtillon II – the world’s largest Celtic coin hoard.  You’ll learn what might have led people to bury a hoard of 70,000 coins and jewellery in Jersey 2,000 years ago. 

Or read more about this amazing story on our website. The Coin Hoard Comes Home | Jersey Heritage. 

Transcript

The Jersey Heritage Podcast: The Small Island, Big Story Sessions

Le Câtillon II with Neil Mahrer

Perry (00:02):

Welcome to the Jersey Heritage Podcast,

Mel (00:05):

The Small Island Big Story sessions.

Perry (00:08):

You are listening to Mel and Perry. In today's episode, we are going to be digging into the Le Câtillon II found in 2012 on a cold January day by two local metal detectorists. This hoard surprised us all with its sheer size in contents.

Mel (00:24):

Today we speak to Neil Mahere, our very own Jersey Heritage conservator, who will be sharing his experiences of working with the horde and the artifacts found within. Welcome to today's episode, Neil. Lovely, thank you. Thanks for coming along. I think it's safe to say that this topic's been a family favorite for some time. Now. I remember you working on the hoard at the hook bee up at the lab there and there was a, a real sense of excitement at the time. There

Neil (00:49):

Really was. I mean, people like treasure, it's as simple as that. You know, you can, you can try and spin an archeology story in all sorts of ways and it usually works, but having kilos of gold does help.

Mel (00:59):

Yeah, I'm sure it does. So how, how were you feeling at the time working on this amazing piece of history? Well,

Neil (01:06):

It kind of varied as it went along because, I mean, sort of day one when we got the call from Richard and Vege, they were being quite cautious. They obviously didn't wanna look like fool if it turned out to be nothing. So they were very cautious about whether it was gonna be anything. And even sort of the, the top estimate of what it was gonna be, we thought it'd be like the bottom half of a pot with coins in it. So that would've been a substantial haul. And so we went there assuming we'd be like in and out in one day and that was nice. That was exciting. That was good. But yeah, it just carried on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and yeah, that's when we realized it really was something special.

Perry (01:38):

And how, how did you get it out then? Like how big is this thing and how did you safely remove it from the ground?

Neil (01:45):

Very big and luckily I would say, yeah it was enormous. I mean, when we actually uncovered all, all of the edges in the ground, it was like three days before we could see the full size. And it is about one meter 40 long, about 80 centimeters wide. And in the end about 15 centimeters deep in coins. So that sort of 400 kilos or so of coins. But then there was still all the earth between it and the earth underneath it as well. So when we got out the ground, it actually weighed about a ton. It went from being very exciting to very worrying quite quickly when we realized how big the thing was. 'cause It was literally, you know, how the hell do we get this out, out of the ground? 'cause What we didn't know was how strong the connection between the coins there.

Neil (02:23):

I mean, essentially there were 70 something thousand silver copper alloy coins had just been poured into a hole in the ground. And the only way they were connected was the degree to which they'd corroded the sort of copper in the coins had corroded. And as the corrosion came out from the coin surfaces, it sort of melded to the coin next to it and that to the coin next to that. So it was an entire thing just held together by this corrosion. So we kind of knew it was gonna weigh as much as a small car, but we didn't know whether it was strong enough to lift or was fragile as glass, you know. So we had to think of a way to try to support it as evenly as we could. And in the end, we, we dug further down than the bottom of the hort.

Neil (03:02):

We went down about another 30 centimeters or so. And that was really hard 'cause we found out why they stopped then. It's 'cause you hit rock, basically <laugh>. So yeah, we had to dig through sort of a mixed shale and rock and stuff, another 30 centimeters down. And then we undercut the base of the hoard as much as we did. So originally it was on a pillar, the sort of the same width as the hoard itself. And then we undercut that, undercut that till it was on a sort of inverted cone. And then we just using hand tools, just dug four tunnels through that base layer of earth under the hoard so that we could get straps ropes underneath it. So essentially we got four nylon. We straps through that and they fitted around a scaffold structure that went around the outside of the hall, which could then itself be connected to chains so that it could be lifted by a crane.

Neil (03:50):

So that was a couple of days work doing that. And it was, it was sort of the best thing we could come up with as a way to do it. But yeah, the pressure was on a day at the lift because all the local media had found out about this in the, the days we'd been doing the dig and it all promised not to release the story if they could be there to see it coming out the ground. So it was a bit of a punt as to whether this would work. But the basically TV cameras just all the way around the pit. Yeah. Watching it,

Perry (04:15):

The pressure's on.

Neil (04:16):

We got away with it. Yeah.

Perry (04:17):

Yeah. I mean it's ingenious, the system you came up with in such a short amount of time. It

Neil (04:21):

Was a bit back of a packet. <Laugh> what's funny looking back on it, because no one else has excavated hoard out the ground that size and got it out in one piece before. I mean, in fact, the biggest hoard in Britain before that was the froom hoard 62,000 coins, which used to seem a lot Yeah. <Laugh>. And they basically got that out with buckets just outta the ground. They just tipped them all into buckets, one as time well pale full at time and got them out. And I think the only reason we did it successfully is that we were so rushed, we never had time to find out that you couldn't do it. Yeah. So we, we simply assumed we'd have to get it out in one piece. That was just the obvious thing we had to do. And we never thought about not doing it. So we just came up with, with that in a hurry. And luckily it worked.

Perry (05:04):

Getting it out in one piece has actually been very, very enlightening for the kind of archeology of the hoard, hasn't it? Like if we got out in buckets, we never would have got as much information out of it as we had. Yeah.

Neil (05:17):

The fact that we managed to get it out as one intact object meant that it was completely undisturbed and that we could essentially do a new archeological excavation just on the horde. And so for the first time, you could look at all the contents and if you could get down to sort of recording all their positions in that way, you could find out a lot about, well, who gave what to the hoard, you know? Yeah. What, what jewelry was associated with, what kind of coins? Or did they all go in on the same day? Was it more than one hoard being poured in there? So yeah, we knew we had that chance once it was outta the ground, but that was sort of mid 2012 and we never got straight on with anything really because there were loads of questions to be sorted about who actually owned it. Mm-Hmm. Was there a treasure trove law who had to be involved? And that took the best part of two years to get that ironed out before we had permission to actually take the thing apart. Really. Yeah. So

Mel (06:12):

When did you actually start working on, on taking this piece apart?

Neil (06:17):

It's kind of two phases. Right At the beginning we got permission to just clean off the earth so we could see what it was. So this is essentially, as soon as we got it back into the lab off the site, I then spent about a month just sort of tiny hand tools and soft brushes just removing the earth from the surface so we, we could see the coins. And that itself was really exciting. 'cause We knew it was a coin hoard, but we couldn't really do estimates. We couldn't know where the coins came from, who buried them at this stage. So just cleaning it off to reveal the coins on the surface we could see straight away that most of them seem to be from one tribe, the Ali tribe who are from the sort of buyer to, so Marlow, bit of briney.

Neil (06:54):

And then what was interesting is that the first thing I did was cleaned a 15 centimeter strip across the top and down one side. And by pure luck, the, the bit I started on there was a piece of silver jewelry. There was a bracelet on the surface there, first days cleaning. So we kind of knew there was, there was more than one type of thing. It wasn't just coins. And then when I went down the side, there were two talks, gold talks, the huge neck wings visible, just coming outta the side of the haw. And I just remember giving our director John ing, just saying, you know, you know the Jersey gold talk, but we've got two now. That was very exciting. And then about an hour I phoned him in and said, oh, we've got three now. Oh. And yeah, just carried on cleaning around and just all these things coming out. And that was important because that kind of dictated what we did. There was some initial question of whether we were gonna leave the hoard intact just as the object that we found. But then when we realized that there was, it wasn't just a coin hold, there was all this other jewelry and amazing selection stuff, and most of it would've been hidden inside. We thought we just, we, we couldn't leave it. It, it was too big to get x-rayed. So we had to literally take it apart to find out what was there really.

Perry (08:01):

And, and so what other kinds of objects were there then? Because obviously mostly coins. Yeah. You said we got torques. What other stuff was

Neil (08:08):

It? Yeah, I mean, there's still a lot of contention among the archeologists if it was a sort of offering to the gods or whether it's essentially a scrap metal hoard, what we got, you could call scrap metal. I mean, there's a, a large amount of jewelry, both gold and silver, and it's in sort of two kinds. One half of it, a bit less perhaps, is material that you could have literally taken off that day and thrown into the hole. So you'd have these fantastic gold neck talks, bracelets, rings, which were just as they were when someone had had last warmed them. But there was also jewelry, which had been chopped up literally as scrap metal torques, which had had their interior stripped out and then just been sort of rolled up and flattened. So you have got half what is basically like scrap metal and half jewelry as worn.

Neil (08:55):

And then there were other things. I mean the bizarre thing with the kelts for us is that they, they left no written records themselves. So we've got objects that we just don't know what they are. We've got silver things we're calling ingots for the lack of a proper name, but we just don't know what they are. They may have been worn, they may have gone on statues, they may been waiting to be turned into something else. And hopefully, you know, we'll find out more as, as more and more research on this is done. Really.

Mel (09:19):

And am I correct in saying that though, you found some fabric at one stage? Yeah.

Neil (09:23):

Yeah. That was really lucky because I mean, we kind of knew when we proposed it that there was gonna be the coins and there was gonna be the jewelry and stuff. But as we went down, we began to find more things more organic material than we'd expected. So there were traces of sort of textiles. We don't think that the coins were buried in bags. We think literally bags or baskets were just tipped into the hole. But those bags or baskets probably had scraps of other bags and things in them. So there, there was that, there was one collection of objects which looked like a metal worker's sort of scrap bag. It was literally just a roll of textile. And inside that there were all these pieces of chopped up jewelry and silver wire and things. And it's one of those things that's nice 'cause a lot of archeology, like the big picture about, you know, what does all this mean?

Neil (10:08):

So in a sort of geopolitical tense census, but it also, you, you get an absolute snapshot of a day sometime. And there was this bag of metal, which one guy had obviously phone in there, and he had things like a collection of rings and silver bracelets and things which were all threaded onto a bro. And the broach was closed and then that was just like thrown in and elsewhere there were lots of bracelets and rings, which were just put onto one bracelet piece of wire, which was bent around. He just twisted closed. So we've still, we still got those kind of the day they were sort of thrown away almost. It's like

Mel (10:43):

An ancient safety pin. Yeah. Keeping everything together

Neil (10:46):

Literally is, and that as a conservator, it was a bit of a nightmare because you wanna take these things apart and clean them, but we couldn't, you know, we couldn't trust that the spring was still flexible enough that you could undo it. So I've had to treat all the objects still all connected to this one sort of broach. Yeah. Wow. And then a complete surprise was for the purse, literally, you know, the standard view of like Celtic iron H coins is you never find them in burials. You never find a few of them. They're always found in hos. We don't think it was used as money in the conventional way that we think of. Well, perhaps until 10 years ago. I know we're living now in now like a post money age, but yeah, you don't find one person with five coins on them.

Neil (11:24):

You always find them in these hoards. So there was no European iron age purse, for instance. There just hasn't been one. And we found one inside the hoard, which was a, a complete surprise. So there's this leather pouch which says suspended off, two rings off like a belt and it's got sort of pulls to open and close the thing. And it was, it was full of pretty much the same kind of coins as the rest of the ones in the hall there. So that's a completely u unique object. Other surprises, I mean, one of the things I liked from the purse, as I say, is it the actual leather bag of the purse was still connected to these two big rings, which is how it would be suspended from the belt. And no iron NH purses have been found before. But what Andrew Fitzpatrick, who's one of ours who advisors comment on is what you find in Iron Age burials all over Europe are people buried with all usual things you expect and two large rings by their hip and nothing else has been found. So it may well be in fact that they were buried with with purses, but they just acade

Perry (12:26):

Those. Just speaking from a, from my work doing, doing fines is that since I've been doing it for the last few years, there has actually been a growing amount Yeah. Of singular INH CARite coins showing up everywhere too.

Neil (12:38):

Yeah. I I think that view is sort of changing. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's cost. It's sort of statistically if you look at the 200,000 INH coins that have been found, 195,000 of them will be in big hoards. But that still means that you find, you found fi Yeah. 500 or 5,000 in twos and threes and fours. That is changing. I mean, I know one of the views quoted because the, the invasion of France by GA seems to have actually stimulated coin making among the goals in like a big way. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And one of the ideas is that if you were part of the sort of warrior of elite of your tribe, you could go from your farm ride 20 miles on your horse and be at the frontier check things are okay, meet with your mates and then if nothing's happening, you go back in the evening. So essentially you never have to buy anything. But if all the tribes are forming a confederation to fight Julius Caesar, and for the first time you are gonna be going 300 kilomet kilometers down south in France, you are gonna be away from home for a few months. And it may have been that they actually produce this coinage at short notice just to pay for that to basically pay for troops.

Perry (13:46):

There's something clearly special happening in, in the hoarding horizon of jersey. As you said, the last hoard was also the biggest one. Yeah. And it hasn't just been those two. There's been lots of late INH hoards in Jersey. Yeah, that's great. And we can talk about hoards from the late bronze agent and many other periods in Jersey, really, but there's something really special going on here.

Neil (14:06):

It is crazy. I mean, I remember when we found this hoard and we did a first estimate of the num numbers and we knew it was sort of high 60 thou thousand coins or so. I remember just looking up all the records I could find off French Celtic hos and just toting them all up. And Frances had fewer Celtic coins than we'd found in, in this hoard. Mm-Hmm. And it's a little frustrating. People always talk with these like coy coins or sun's coins or whatever, but they're all found over here. Yeah. Most French INH coinage comes from from Jersey. It's just really strange. It does

Mel (14:39):

Beg the question like what was going on? Yeah. Like what was happening here that made this place such a, an important place to hide this kind of stuff. Yeah.

Neil (14:48):

But you know, if it is just being hidden, I mean, one of the, one the other options is that they were being made here. Yeah. We just don't know. But I mean, one of the other things that we found in this hoard were were ingots made of the same coin material. So essentially we've got like 500 coins melted down to make any an in ingot again and again and again through this hoard. In fact, we can see half melted coins on some of the sort of surfaces of the ingots. So we know that they were, there was exchange going on between coins being turned into ingots and ingots were used later to make coins again. So whether that's, again, it could just be being rushed off the French mainland to be hidden here, or perhaps there was actually a mint here. It's one of the reasons we're so interested in getting back on the site to try and get some sort of context because we, you know, we've got the most important Celtic hor from Europe and we've dug two by two meters of that field. We literally, there could be another one three meters away and, and we wouldn't know it. There could be temples, there could be a hill fault, there could be a mint. We just don't know.

Perry (15:50):

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I was just gonna say I think it's important with, with all this new evidence that's come up, not only the hordes, but the fines evidence. I think it's really important to kind of reanalyze jersey as not this isolated place Yeah. Where maybe people came hid stuff and left. Yeah. Actually the evidence is pointing towards a place that was well occupied and continuously occupied in the late Iron Age. We've got fortified structures, we've got all sorts of high status gear, not just in the hordes. And to be honest, my sort of view, you know, pending actual archeological further investigation is that the site of Laca is a defended site. I mean, if you've, if you've ever actually been up there and stood in that field, it has views of the entire sea around there. Yeah. It's very defensible. And it's called Laca. Yes. Which is which? The

Neil (16:41):

Castle.

Perry (16:42):

The castle. I mean what, but

Neil (16:43):

Theres ne there's never, ever been, you know, from the first maps and medieval readings we have, there's nothing there. So is this a name that's been preserved for, for 2000 years basically?

Perry (16:55):

Yeah. You know, we, we have defended probable Iron Age sites across the island and I think that we just need to update that view of, oh, the, the Crio Society came here, hid stuff and left. Yeah. The Crio Society are here. Yeah. Now they also have places in, in like Arm Mor and Brittany, you know, but were they situated here? Was this their seat of power or was this just another part of their territory? I think yeah,

Neil (17:20):

The site itself you know, we may just have sort of scratch, scratch the top of what's there. I mean, we know two wards found in the fifties in that field in the same place. Yeah.

Perry (17:31):

Yeah. That's why it's the cat on two.

Neil (17:32):

Yeah. 'cause there was another big, big one found there and another one which was found but not recorded properly. And that's probably the first stuff that Reg and Richard found in the field in 2012. But even when we were digging down, we just dug, dug two by two meters and we went through what we call the scattered hoard, which is one that was high enough that it's basically been plowed up and down the field. So it's no longer in one small type bit, but sort of spread. We went through that. Then on the way down we hit the first century Adro Roman halt, whoa, not much, but a small number of coins, trait tracers of jewelry. Some, some, some, some Roman objects. But that means that the site was used by the French Celts before their conquest by the Romans to bury treasure and was still being used by people after the Roman conquest for the same purpose.

Neil (18:27):

Literally a small hoard was buried 18 inches, 50 centimeters from the big hor. Whether they knew about it or not, we don't, we don't know. So what looks like is you've got, you've got a site where people come again and again and again a a and bury treasure essentially. And in England, I mean, I know it's all theoretical, but sites where you get that with Celton England, they're thought to be religious. They're thought they're generally near a spring or something like that. And people seem to come back again and again and make these offerings. So it may be similar to that.

Perry (18:57):

Well, it's also worth noting as well that islands in Celtic Gaul and Celtic Britain have always had a sign of special significance or a kind of, they've often had a sort of religious, you know, connotation, religious connotation. You know, a big one would be sort of angle sea up the north of Wales. Yeah. I love Angle Sea, which was the kind of aisle of the Druids and the last place that the, the Romans kind of invaded and his jersey a sort of similar place to that, you know. So what kind of further analysis then has been done since it's been conserved?

Neil (19:30):

Right. I mean, the big thing I think for us, the thing that was different to everything else was, was we were able to do, 'cause I say we'd excavated in one piece when we finally got permission to actually disassemble hoard. Fortunately we also got budget from the Jersey government to do it in the way that we'd asked. 'cause We knew we could record contents in a way that had never been done before. And we got something we called a six axis metrology arm, which is a, a fancy name for what is essentially a sort of pistol grip device you hold in your hand. And that's connected to a computer. And on sort of clicking the trigger, the computer knows exactly in three dimensions where the, the tip of this sort of pistol grip is. So you can record every bit of it. You literally tap the top of one of the coins enter, and on the computer screen a, a disc will appear.

Neil (20:16):

And you just call that coin one, go to the next coin, tap that one a disc next to the first disc will appear. Call that coin two. And we basically did that two or 300 coins a day for three years. Just take two or 300 a day. Yeah, yeah. You would literally record the position of one, remove that with actually a, so like a, a blunt knife. It turns out that the coin separated really quite easily that they would, they would crack in the corrosion layer between the coins just with a bit of light pressure. So yeah, you'd use the device, record the position, remove that coin, go to the next one, record the position, remove that. So basically one person on the pc, one person using the device. So I would've loved that job. Yeah. It was amazing. And so we just got into this pattern where, where we took them all off and what that builds is a of virtual model of the horde.

Neil (21:02):

So as we essentially destroy the hoard, 'cause at the end of our process when the last two coins are separated, you've destroyed the hoard as an object. It's, it's a rather sad collection of Tupperware boxes <laugh> on store shelves at, at that point. But what you have then for future research is a virtual model of the hoard, where the position of 16, nine and half thousand coins is logged to high precision. All the talks and everything else in that model as well. So what you can do, and we've literally got the point of doing it now in cooperation with the Museum of London Archeology Service who've been doing actual software side of it for us, is we've now got a database where you literally get a three-dimensional projection and model of the hoard. And you can say to it, oh, show me all the coins before 100 bc.

Neil (21:45):

Show me all the coins from the vines. Show me all the coins from the co. Show me all the coins over a certain weight. Under a certain weight. Wow. And it gives you maps of that. So that's never been done before. And we hoped that would show us something. And immediately it did. 'cause Even without thinking what you're looking, the moment you do that, you see the kinds of coins and where they are in the hoard, you realize it's actually, it's made up of two different hoards. There's literally a diagonal layer visible across the hoard body where the coins on top of it and below it are different. Basically the, the COOs punched out a number of different kinds of coins and they've been put into the six major groups probably all produced within something like 15 years or so from the years before Julius Seas arrived to like mass production at the end.

Neil (22:29):

And the first coins they made were quite high in silver. There wasn't too much copper in the coins. They were quite fine. And then they basically had an inflation crisis during their war. And by the end the coins were perhaps 90% copper, just sort of 10, 10% silver. And what you find is that they brought one hoard of older better coins and one hoard of later poor quality coins and poured them one after another in into the same pit. So what we've got now is Cat on two is actually at least two previous hors from, from somewhere else. So that's the first thing that we found out from that. And literally we're just at the beginning of the sort of re research. So a lot more will come out, I'm sure Phil, Phil de jersey, the, the archeologist from Guernsey is a real world authority on these coins.

Neil (23:15):

And he's doing all of that kind of research for us. And one of the things he's doing is dye research, which is actually more interesting than it sounds possibly, essentially means that to make these coins you would melt about the white amount of metal for the coin as like a flattish disc in a little container. And then you heat that flat disc, which is a blank up to sort of cherry red heat again. And you place it between two dyes, which are stamps with the pattern of each face of the coin in reverse on them. And you whack that hard with a 10 kilo hammer and that stamps the pattern into the coin. And if you are a person who's fascinated by these coins, you wanna know what dyes they use. We think they could actually do tens of thousands of coins with one dye.

Neil (23:57):

But the dyes themselves are interesting because if you spot a coin where the back and the front are from a particular dyes, and you can tell them, 'cause they're all handmade, so they're all different. You then may find coins somewhere else in the ho hoard where one side of it is from one that one of those dyes, but the others isn't. And you go through all that again, again, again, do all that research. You get an idea of where the coins were made, you know, who made them, one person did 5,200 in one position and then went somewhere else and he got another one from someone else and then they made 3000 there. And it gives you that sort of background. So that's one of the things that he's doing into. And he's been working with researchers in Germany about using a AI to actually do the recognition. 'cause At the moment, I mean he enjoys it 'cause he's a sad coin enthusiast <laugh>, he just looks at photograph after photograph of 69,000 coins and spots patterns about which die is which, if you can spare anyone three years of doing that and get an AI to do it for you in in half an hour, it's clearly a good thing. Yeah. For his wife, if no one else <laugh>. So

Perry (25:02):

Phil's done some great experimental work he has back in the day as well with dyes where he, he got a copper alloy bronze dye made and he struck what was about 10,000 coins or

Neil (25:11):

Something. Yeah. He, he's the person who found out how you do this. Yeah. Because even now, if you see pictures of coin making in books of this period, someone will sit while politely at a chair at a table and he's sort of tapping them with a pin hammer. And what Phil found was even pure gold coins, the softest metal that they would've had to deal with a fit man with a big lump hammer, can't strike a gold coin cold. It's got to be like glowing cherry red to be soft enough to strike. So he's got some theories about how they were done, whether it was indoors to keep it dark or whether at dusk or something like that. But essentially one person's job to be, to heat the coins to the right coins to pass them to someone else who then holds them on top of the D while a third person strikes them. And he reckons you can do hundreds of coins in a day doing this and that the dies last surprisingly well. Well

Perry (25:59):

Another thing he noted in his paper actually was that the sheer amount of fuel needed to do this. Yeah. You constantly need to have the charcoal and, and the wood to heat things up so you can strike them this much. Yeah. I mean it's, it's the great thing about experimental archeology. Yeah. But we

Neil (26:13):

Go and, and it, it's interesting you almost never find the dyes. The dyes, the punches which are used to make these coins are like bankers sort of bank note plates to them. You know, if you're gonna run into a bank, steal the bank plates, don't steal the note. 'cause You can make another million notes. Yeah, yeah. The plate. And they were obviously held incredibly securely because I mean, there are one or two in the British Museum and there's one in the French National Archeology Museum in Paris. I mean, there must have been hundreds in use and you just don't find them. So presumably they were destroyed. Yeah.

Mel (26:46):

Yeah. So were the people creating these coins, obviously people, positions of power.

Neil (26:49):

Yeah. I mean they would've been professionals. I mean that, again, PO can say more about this, but these are tribes where people would have jobs. You know, you'd be a coin maker, a metalsmith, and then you'd specialize in silver.

Perry (27:00):

Yeah. I think, I think the money would've been held in quite high regard actually. And maybe even traveled around two different Yeah, well different tribes, different different groups to do their coins for them. I think it was such a kind of like a, a very high status jeweler maybe. Mm. You know, under the employee of whoever was in charge of these, of these tribes.

Mel (27:19):

Yeah. Really, really interesting that that this, that this particular horde can give us so much insight into an ancient civilization that we don't really know very much about. No,

Neil (27:29):

No. And it is, it is important to say as well there's that there's a lot of this stuff that we just don't know. I mean the two people writing our publication for this project in terms of the actual sort of coinage and what it means and so forth, disagree completely about the age of the hor. One of them thinks it dates banged the war against Julius Caesar. And one thinks it's about 20 years later and it comes down to, well we've got coins of a type found in England, which are about 40 BC rather than mid fifties. So he thinks it's post conquest and the other guy thinks, no it doesn't. I mean everything else in the horde points to it being straight on for the time during the war mm-hmm <affirmative>. And this what will change all, all the time, you know, with the, the picture we present at the horde and what we know about it now is at the best we can do, but will change in 20 years and 50 years. Yeah. Completely.

Perry (28:17):

And if we can get back in the field Absolutely. And get proper stratigraphy and, and further, I mean it might really help us nail it down. Yeah. But, you know, dating anything that long away, I mean to a degree of 10 years is Yeah.

Neil (28:28):

With, without knowing what else is around there, you know, we're just throwing dark to the board about whether it's a temple site or a hill fort or a mint or a village or won. Yeah. We just don't know.

Mel (28:37):

Yeah. It'll be amazing to see what in like 30, 50, 60 years time people are doing.

Neil (28:42):

Yeah. And we've tried to be careful with that. We tried to sort of futureproof the project as well, partly in recording the position of all the coins and things and the way we did, but also because the hold was just so huge. We had the luxury of keeping like 1,500 coins aside, uncleaned. So they could be used for any kind of future research. And we actually preserved one block of the hoard completely untouched with all the earth and organic materials and milli beads and everything else still, still inside it. And that's now being frozen and just kept again for like sort of future research because you know, no matter how careful someone's research is, you've only gotta read the excavation of T and carbon or something. You think, oh God, why didn't they keep that? Why didn't they, because they didn't know about DNA. Yeah. They didn't know about carbon dating. So there's all, there'll always be potential in the future to find out more about something. So we've tried to sort of build that in to, to the way that we've done it.

Mel (29:32):

Like I was, I was even reading on our website obviously we have a page about, about the horde and there's a section in there that says, you know, 20 to 30 years ago you might have just cleaned a piece of silver or gold. Yeah. But now you can find information about Yeah. Sediment that's on it. Yeah. And like the corrosion and, and that, that stuff has got crucial information. Yeah,

Neil (29:49):

No, that, that's the thing that really has, has changed. And it's changed. You know, I've been a conservative for so, so long God help me. I'm so old that that's strange

Mel (29:56):

Experience now. Experience experience.

Neil (29:57):

Yeah. Being sort of late iron age myself. I mean I've, I've seen that. Yeah. When I'd begun this I would've gleaned all of that back, back to a gloss. And, but the research has become so much more important now that slightly frustratingly you have to leave material <laugh>. Not as nice as it could be.

Perry (30:13):

But I mean there wasn't only Iron Age objects No. Associated with the hoard. Was there, there was something at the bottom.

Neil (30:22):

This is, yeah. One of the, one of the weirdest things we found, well how weird it was, I guess depends on its entirely interpretation. But we'd gone right through the horde, as you can imagine, essentially from the top down. And at the bottom of the hoard there were more interesting selection of objects. It wasn't just coins, but we were coming across more jewelry glass beads. The purse, the textile bag of sort of met metal workers fragments and things. And there was a bronze spearhead. But it wasn't just a bronze spearhead, it was very specifically a Bronze Age spearhead. So it was probably 800 years older than pretty much everything else in the hor.

Mel (30:57):

I think I remember you finding this and being very excited

Neil (30:59):

About this. It

Perry (31:00):

Was,

Neil (31:00):

It crazy to me. It was crazy. 'cause I mean it was really obvious what it was straight away. It was like, woohoo, that's that, that's bronze age. Some people involved in the project pe people who are better qualified to answer this than me don't think that's particularly significant. They think this is just scrap metal, but there's almost no bronze in there. This is a precious metal hoard and this is right at the bottom. And so perhaps being of a more romantic bend than that, I think this must have meant something to them. Mm-Hmm. It's not random. It's, it's in the bottom with the, I dunno, ritualized stuff. They, they, they did things they didn't need to. There was stuff put in there, the purse, the jewelry, the glass beads and things went down first. And among them was this bronze sage spearhead. And yeah, we just dunno what it meant to them. You know, you can, you, you can imagine stories they would've told about who owns this spear. I mean, they would've known it was 800 years old, but they would've known it was from the time before iron. You know, they would've had stories about that, that it would, might have been a, a great ancestors weapon. A god's weapon. So

Mel (32:00):

The romantic and you thinks it's been placed in there with intents.

Neil (32:02):

I think it meant something. But people better qualifi than me aren't necessarily gonna, I

Mel (32:07):

Like it. Let's go with what Neil thinks.

Perry (32:08):

Well they, they might have found it when they were digging their own. I mean, they'd be digging all the time. All sorts of drainage ditches. Yeah. And stuff gets found by farmers and people

Neil (32:17):

Digging now. So, and they have put pon, the kes did put ponage stuff into hoards before as well. It's been found in France and England where they'll get, again, an 800 year old weapon or spearhead or something and, and they'll actually engrave it themselves afresh. And then that gets buried in, in the horde.

Mel (32:33):

The other thing that I, that I wanted to touch on, Neil, is as part, as part of the exhibition that we have at La Hook be is you actually made a model of the horse Yeah. So that people could see what it looked like. Yeah. When you guys found it. Yeah. Could you explain like how you made it and, and yeah. Why you thought it was important?

Neil (32:50):

We, we decided to do that because we were just doing research about getting it scanned or how could we record things. And before we were sure that we could get it scans that we talked about and also laser scans, we decided we had to make a copy. I mean the object we knew was kind of strong enough at that stage that we could afford to do this. And so I used silicon rubber which we essentially pour over the thing to actually record the shape of the sort of coin surfaces. Just to make sure it didn't stick to them. We actually sprayed the thing with water as like a release agent. And then basically, yeah, first I did a top layer, just the actual flat top of the hoard. And that meant pouring sort of cream consistency, silicon rubber over it. So it got down into between all the coins.

Neil (33:34):

Once that had set and was hard, it was still too flexible to do a mold. So then I used polyurethane foam just like poured on top of that, which then set hard and that made a backing that kept the silicon rubber in shape. So that recorded the top surface. And then I did the same thing for the sides in about seven pieces because you couldn't do a whole sort of strip around the whole thing. So yeah, I made all these molds, which did different bits of the hoard surface. And then I used epoxy ribbon, epoxy resin and glass fiber to make molds of all of those bits. So we had one mold for the top surface and then seven different bits of the sides. And then assembled those together, just basically using glass fiber again to build it all into one. And then just by having the epoxy resin model next to the original, just actually painted the thing sort of by hand just to, to get it to look right. And that's been very useful. And I actually used gold. So it's actually gilded on where you could see the gold jewelry, most of which has now been rubbed off by ch chook <laugh> children's F fingers. But yeah, tho those fits were actually gilded. So yeah, we had, we had a model of the whole thing to sort of preserve the size of it, which is an a nice thing. Oh

Mel (34:42):

It's so impressive when you look at it and, and the nice thing about it is you're right, you can actually touch it. Mm-Hmm. So it kind of gives visitors the experience that they're kind of like what it would've been like for you guys to actually be working on it.

Neil (34:54):

Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was a crazy time.

Perry (34:57):

Have you ever stumbled upon what you believe might be an archeological object at Jersey Heritage? We are committed to preserving an understanding our rich history for our public fine scheme. I'll photograph, identify and record your fines. Every artifact recorded contributes to expanding our archeological knowledge. Call me at eight three three one four one. Now what I want to know for all the budding conservatives out there, how do you learn to do all of this stuff? I mean, even just the process you were talking about of making a mold of this thing is extremely kind of complex. You know, how did you

Neil (35:36):

Work all this out? Yeah, the conservator trained me here because I started as a trainee and did like a two year apprenticeship before going to uni. I was trained some mold making by him, but then ironically I went to Denmark to learn how to do it with the same guy that trained him in fact. Oh really? So I went to this town in the middle of nowhere famous, only from mental hospital in the woods in Denmark, which a strange place but learned how to make those kind of molds. But the general conservation thing, you know, I, I studied archeological conservation, which is clearly the best background for this. But that only takes you so far. So then you've gotta use a sort of network of like connections you've got. So soon as this came out the ground, when you, what it was, I got in touch with archeological conservative I you at the British Museum and Stafford, your Horde project and various others just to see what they did.

Neil (36:21):

So you kind of all worked together and build on each other's shoulders in terms of techniques and things. But then you also, each of you sort of moves on a little bit. So getting it out the ground I guess was something we did for the first time. And then I also came up with a way of keeping the thing wet during the whole process because we got out the ground in 2012 and we knew it was full of organics and stuff and that they would all have become useless for sort of research if they dried out. So we had to keep it wet. So I developed a technique for that using ultrasonic humidifier, which basically poured a blanket of sort of cold mist over actual surface.

Mel (36:59):

I remember. Yeah, it looked, I I was wondering what that was for. 'cause It looks really atmospheric. I was like, is this just,

Neil (37:04):

It was mostly for that but it also looked cool. Yeah. But so that's something that sort of being adopted more now. So it's a mixture of stuff you learn and people have done before and stuff. You've kind of gotta make up yourself really. But really having colleagues you can call on is the most useful thing. 'cause As soon as we found the person realized it was leather, it was like straight on to conservatives about how to do that and things. 'cause You can't be a specialist in ev in sort of everything. Yeah.

Mel (37:28):

That's what I find really interesting about the whole process of you guys working on the hall is how many people come in to help and yeah. You know, there must have been so many different specialists and people with really niche kind of knowledge that helped you guys unpack the information and Yeah.

Neil (37:43):

And that worked really, really well. We were very lucky with sort of colleagues mo mostly from England about that. But also, I mean just the actual practical things. When I'd written my proposal and like budget everything for getting this done, I said yeah, we could sort of disassemble the accord the hor in three years. And I had two assistants who we recruited to work with me, George Kelly and Vicki Nik, who were both qualified archeologists looking for their first job. So they did pretty well and that was great. But it became apparent in like a few months that there's just no way we were gonna meet the sort of pace we needed. So then we got a team of volunteers and in the, in the end we had a team of about 25 pe people working sort of shifts on the cleaning recording photography, all that kind of thing. And we, we, we just couldn't have done it without them. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of all hands to the pumps. Yeah.

Mel (38:28):

Amazing. Yeah. We're so, so lucky with our volunteers, the jazz heritage. Yeah. It

Neil (38:33):

Amazing. It's great. I mean some of them have been worked on different projects for us before and some of them came in the first time. It was, it was great. Yeah.

Mel (38:39):

So Neil, what was, what was your favorite moment from Excavate? Well, from all the whole, from the whole thing, what was your favorite thing to find? The

Neil (38:48):

Favorite thing to fight? God knows the spearhead was pretty good, I have to say. That was quite something. It was, it was probably the purse I think. 'cause We just didn't know what it was. I dunno, there's so, so many favorites. Actually the first big talk we got out was pretty amazing because the talks we could see poking out the side. One of 'em was completely crumpled and one of 'em was very thin. And I remember we basically went down from the top and as I say it was kind of two 300 coins a day. And every now and again you'd stop and go oh gold. And we'd all come out and have a look and you could just see a trace of gold under one. And the first sort of big fat talk that we got out was pretty amazing 'cause we didn't know there was anything like that in there. And it was just huge. And the interesting with gold is it's very, very high, high, high quality gold. It's over 24 carat and just doesn't corrode. So it just looks new. You know, you just look down through the coins and there was just this fat gold torque in there.

Mel (39:39):

That is insane. Were you tempted to put it on

Neil (39:41):

No. <Laugh> <laugh>? No. We did have ones in two halves where we've got various of them in, in, in two halves. Most of them are still connected. They've got a sort of mortous joint to the front and they click close behind the neck. And we haven't dared tried to undo the ones which are complete. Mm. But we've also got about eight or 10 halves, some of which we know match they are actually pairs. And we did try fitting a couple of those around Georgia's neck, <laugh>. 'cause Georgia, as you may recall, is a tiny person. She's very

Mel (40:10):

Petite,

Neil (40:10):

Very busy. She's a tiny person. And we tried that and some of those even we couldn't get about her neck. So they were clearly in fact for, for children. Wow.

Mel (40:18):

Which, so that was a useful kind of thing. It was, yeah. You know, exercise. Yeah.

Neil (40:21):

I think the great thing in the cleaning I remember think I enjoyed most in the cleaning that was a surprise, was you would be cleaning the gold talks under a microscope. And again, we didn't use harsh chemicals or anything on them. We, what we actually used were thorns from plants held in a tiny little hand tool and you could poke off the corrosion from the coins and other things from them to reveal the, the absolutely perfectly clean gold underneath. And what was interesting on a lot of the talks was you would be able to essentially sort of flick off like a scale of green corrosion from the coins and you'd see a new square centimeter or something of the gold surface that no one had seen for 2000 years. And it was, it was perfectly clean, but it was also a scratch to hell. And that was just really interesting. You could see that it, that these things had a life of bouncing around on someone's neck while they were horse riding and wearing iron male armor and things Yeah. Hunting. And they, they, they were just bashed and beaten to hell. And it was, to see all of that wear for the first time as it were bit by bit was, was really nice. It's

Mel (41:17):

Actually quite an emotional, it must have been quite an emotional thing too as well.

Neil (41:20):

And it's interesting 'cause people, you know, if you do this every day for three years, you can't maintain a level of excitement. People say, oh I must be so exciting to do this every day thinking about coins. But mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. Every now and again, something does get you and it, it would be seeing the surfaces of the gold OB objects I think under the microscope while cleaning them was quite something. And then, yeah, the things like that little brooch with all the stuff strung on it because that literally record records someone's decision, just something that, that they did before it went into the hall. That kind of thing is nice. Oh, and of course the actual footprint on top of the hold there, there's actually at least one very clear footprint and two, two or three others. Again, just preserving that kind of moment was really nice.

Neil (42:00):

That, that was strange. 'cause I'd seen this and thought it looked like that, but thought again, I'm no specialist, but quite early on we had some come over from Cranfield University who split his time between doing archeology archeological site work and forensic scene crime work for the police. Whoa. 'cause They actually find archeologists are very, very useful in fact for that. And I said, you know, do you think possibly that, you know, kind of could be someone's footprint? And he like, oh, he said yeah, that, that was someone's left foot. He said they, they were wearing some sort of shoe. There was about 15 milli birth on it at the time. They were probably moving it with their hands in that direction. Wow. It's just like, you could just be making this up, but it sounds pretty impressive. <Laugh>, you know, it was quite something. Yeah.

Mel (42:38):

But isn't that interesting how even in this like almost hour of chatting about the horde, you keep bringing up new things. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously you worked on this thing for like three years. Yeah. So there's obviously this is a really substantial and we're not just talking about treasure, we're talking about all sorts of

Neil (42:54):

Other things. Oh yeah. I mean it's easy. I mean, know what attracts people to it and people will remember maybe the gold talks, but this is just gonna tell us so much more about the Celtic people and it's, it's not just the patterns of the coinage and stuff, but it's literally all the, all the organic samples that we collected and were later an analyzed elsewhere. Literally tell us, you know, what crops were being grown around us at the time it was buried and how it got moved. What, what sort of environment it was in somewhere else before it came to the site that the cattle quite possibly what time of year it was actually buried. Think. Think. That's incredible. Yeah, it's amazing,

Mel (43:25):

Isn't it? That's incredible when you think that, you know, you're finding an object but you're actually kind of discovering a lot of intangible heritage. Yeah. So now that we don't have, we don't have the lab at Lai anymore. Yeah. We do have an amazing exhibition up at Lai that people can come visit. Yeah. But recently we've also just opened the new La Dije, which has some of our star Yeah. Objects. So what can people see now in our new exhibition space at the Jersey Museum?

Neil (43:49):

Jersey Museum has got a few of the sort of star objects as it were. So there there's a fairly large case and on one side you've got some of the most impressive jewelry. So you have gold torques and other bits and pieces like that, which just do look glorious. And on the other side of the case, you've got a selection of coins, not a great number, but ones that sort of tell the story about the coins from this one tribe, but also coins from their neighbors, which must have been trade coins from Britain. So that again tells us more, more about it. But that's still only a pretty small percentage of the whole sort of, well it's a small percentage of the whole hoard and it's a small percentage of what's actually on exhibition at HB. HB is the society. If you've got a a real interest in it the bulk of the best material is there. So the bulk of the hordes, all the other jewelry the model you were talking about, the thing itself, that's a, that's a pretty amazing selection of material there. Yeah.

Mel (44:39):

So if people wanna see it now, they can go to both sites. Yeah, yeah. And explore what we have on display. Absolutely. And where is the rest of the hoard now?

Neil (44:46):

Secret locations? <Laugh> in safe storage was about as far as I go. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a sad feature. It's really interesting going around any archeological museum I've seen, no display of a hoard ever does justice to the whole thing. But equally, if you've got 69,000 very similar looking coins, it's hard to interpret them in an interesting way. So I, well under 1% of the holiday is on Show Pro probably most of the nice jewelry and things like that. But the coins, very small percentage of them, but they're useful 'cause they're, they're being used for research and things the entire time as we build towards the actual publication of the exhibition itself, the actual excavation itself, and then other research going on EL elsewhere. There's, they're sort of constantly in use

Perry (45:33):

And there is, there is a constant stream of, of researchers in and out looking at the stuff, which is always really exciting for me. I can't wait to see what, yeah. What they have to say about stuff. Stuff

Neil (45:42):

Ab. Absolutely. Well,

Mel (45:43):

Thank you very much for your time, Neil. That's

Neil (45:44):

Been great. No, good. Always good fun to talk about the hold. Thank you very much.

Mel (45:52):

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