Two Metal Detectorists in the Netherlands Stumbled Onto Hundreds of Looted Coins From the Roman Conquest of Britain

As they swept over the muddy fields of Bunnik, a village in the Netherlands’ Utrecht Province that once marked the northern edge of the Roman Empire, in 2023, two metal detectorists unearthed a remarkably extensive and diverse haul of coins from the first century C.E.

Their find—a collection of 404 gold and silver coins of Roman, British and North African origin—is the first of its kind unearthed on the European continent, according to a statement.

For Gert-Jan Messelaar and Reinier Koelink, the men with the metal detectors, the historic discovery came as something of an accident. They were combing the fields for a local fruit grower’s lost tractor key in Houten when they decided to give up and go over to a nearby field in Bunnik, where they had previously found a few coins, reports RTV Utrecht’s Bas Teunissen.

Koelink made the first find: a golden Celtic coin resting near the surface of the mud. The pair found a few more loose coins—including the largest Roman coin ever found in the province—but their metal detectors would not stop beeping. Messelaar finally stuck his hand into a shallow hole in the ground, where he uncovered a stash of hundreds of coins. “Bingo,” he recalls thinking, according to RTV Utrecht.

Koelink and Messelaar used clumps of mud to keep the coins together before bringing the haul back home, where they carefully cleaned, sorted and reported their findings to cultural heritage authorities. Then, they celebrated.

“We opened a bottle of champagne,” Messelaar tells the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey. “You never find this.”

Following the detectorists’ initial discovery of 381 coins in the summer of 2023, the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, with the help of Koelink and Messelaar, conducted additional excavations in the surrounding areas, finding another 23 coins.

Now, the grand total of 404 coins will now join a permanent exhibition titled “The Netherlands in Roman Times” at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.

Dated to between 200 B.C.E. and 47 C.E., 360 of the coins are Roman in origin. Of these, 288 are denarii, the standard silver coin, and 72 are aurei, a denser, golden coin that was originally worth 25 denarii.

Many of the Roman coins bear the portrait of Emperor Claudius, who reigned between 41 and 54 C.E. One depicts Julius Caesar, while another even rarer coin shows the likeness of Juba, the ruler of Numidia, a kingdom in northern Africa that roughly corresponds to modern-day Algeria.

Two of the Claudius coins dated to between 46 and 47 C.E. are from identical dies, suggesting they were distributed to Roman soldiers as military pay, write Anton Cruysheer, an archaeologist with the Utrecht Landscape and Heritage Foundation, and Tessa de Groot, an archaeologist with the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, for UtrechtAltijd.

The 44 non-Roman coins are perhaps the most notable of the entire stash. The golden alloy coins, known as staters, bear the inscription “CVNO,” the first four letters of Cunobelinus, the Latin name of Celtic King Cunobelin, who reigned between roughly 10 and 42 C.E. in southeastern Britain.

Grote muntvondst uit Romeinse tijd

Cruysheer and de Groot argue that the eclectic composition of the hoard “strongly suggests a connection to the conquest of Britain” under Aulus Plautius, a Roman general who Claudius dispatched to cross the Channel and invade the island in 43 C.E.

The wide range of dates of the Cunobelin staters, including four posthumously issued coins, indicates that the stash was removed from circulation in one fell swoop, like Roman troops looting the newly conquered territory, according to UtrechtAltijd.

Combined with the Roman coins used as military pay, the entire stash strongly resembles spoils of war. Discovered less than a foot beneath the surface, where it was probably buried in a leather pouch that has since decayed, the cache was left in a region where Roman troops were known to have amassed before the invasion of Britain.

“This is the first time that physical evidence of the return of the troops has been found,” Cruysheer tells the Guardian. “Apparently, they came back with all sorts of things. That is new information.”