This Amateur Archaeologist’s Metal Detector Wouldn’t Stop Beeping. He Found 934 Roman Silver Coins Buried in a German Field

The Hadrian-era hoard may represent years of savings hidden nearly 1,900 years ago.

Oliver Riedl had already pulled 15 Roman silver coins from a field in western Germany. But his metal detector would not stop beeping. It was the dream of every amateur archaeologist.

Rather than keep digging, Riedl, an authorized metal detectorist, called in the experts.

“It was clear to me that there was something bigger buried here,” Riedl told the Associated Press.

He was right. Archaeologists excavating the site near Wesseling, just south of Cologne, ultimately recovered a staggering 934 silver denarii weighing 3.1 kilograms, or nearly seven pounds.

According to the official announcement from the LVR Office for Archaeological Heritage Management in the Rhineland, it is the largest known coin hoard from the reign of Emperor Hadrian ever discovered in Germany — and the fifth-largest of its period known worldwide.

The coins appear to have been deliberately buried during Hadrian’s reign, sometime after A.D. 124 or 125. But the collection had been accumulating for generations, containing coins minted by various emperors and even the old republic, before somebody put it in the ground.

Its oldest coin was struck in 148 B.C., during the Roman Republic, meaning it had circulated for more than 270 years before being buried. Most of the coins were minted much later, under the Flavian emperors between A.D. 69 and 96. Archaeologists think the fortune may have been assembled around A.D. 100 and hidden only decades later.

Six years of a soldier’s spending money

It’s hard to say who would have buried so much silver. Since there were no banks for commoners back then, one may assume the person hiding the coins was looking to safely store their wealth. Something must have happened and prevented the person from recovering the wealth.

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The site stood within Rome’s heavily militarized Rhine frontier. Rome had controlled the Cologne region for centuries, transforming an earlier military settlement into Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, one of the most important cities in Roman Germany.

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Yet archaeologists have found no evidence tying the coins to a soldier.

The hoard’s scale nevertheless becomes clearer when compared with army pay.

“At that time, an ordinary soldier in the legion earned 300 denarii a year. However, about half of that was withheld for food and equipment,” Rahel Otte, a researcher with the archaeological office, told the Associated Press.

“A legionary would therefore have had to save all of his disposable income for about six years to amass the Wesseling hoard,” she added.

At today’s silver price, the hoard’s 3.1 kilograms of metal would be worth only about $6,300 if it were pure silver; the actual melt value would be somewhat lower because Roman denarii were not pure silver. But the historic value, of course, is far greater.

In Augsburg, archaeologists previously uncovered nearly 5,600 denarii weighing about 15 kilograms, apparently buried in the early third century. The Wesseling discovery stands out because unusually large hoards from the early second century are much rarer.

A fortune its owner never reclaimed

Why would someone bury a fortune rather than spend it?

“Of course, we can only speculate about the motives, but it’s very likely that someone wanted to keep this money safe. After all, banks didn’t exist back then,” said Erich Classen, the regional state archaeologist.

The owner could have died, fled, forgotten the precise location or been prevented from returning by some other disruption.

“Perhaps the owner died before that could happen, without being able to pass on the knowledge about the coins,” Classen said.

What archaeologists do know is that Riedl’s decision to stop digging preserved information that could easily have been lost. Excavators found the coins concentrated together and removed part of the deposit as an intact block of soil. Conservators later X-rayed the block before separating the coins, allowing them to study how the hoard had been deposited.

Whatever happened to the Roman owner, the hoard remained untouched for nearly 1,900 years.