Iron Age Coinage and Ritual Practices

For some decades, the orthodox view of Iron Age coinages has been that during their period of use they developed and diversified from an initially fairly narrow social and political role into other areas of use, so that by the later first century BC when much of north-west Europe had come under Roman domination, they had assumed many of the functions of general purpose money. The picture that emerges from the papers collected here is, however, rather different. There is now a significant amount of evidence to suggest that Iron Age coinages - unlike their Mediterranean prototypes - remained largely bound up in various kinds of ceremonial and religious usage quite distinct from those with which we are familiar today, never breaking out from the confines of traditional societies and their existing value systems.

This volume has its origins in a colloquium held at the Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, in June 2000. In addition to papers from the speakers at the original meeting, a number of contributions are included from other scholars active in this field, so extending the geographical coverage of the studies to Gaul and western Germany besides Britain.