Digger's Diary: The Arcadius Anomaly (repost from one of my old Treasurenet threads)

This article was originally written for a general audience rather than a specialized numismatic one. ~RWS/"LM"

DIGGER'S DIARY: THE ARCADIUS ANOMALY



Did the ancient Romans ever make it to North America? That’s doubtful. However, some of their coins did, over the last two millennia. This is a 1,600 year old bronze coin of the eastern Roman emperor Arcadius, dating to the turn of the Fourth century AD, probably around the year 395.

And believe it or not, I found it right here in coastal Georgia! Technically this one wasn't found in the Golden Isles proper, but just a bit north of here, on a colonial site in Liberty County.

The crazy thing is, I didn't even have my metal detector with me that day, and found it almost by accident. The coin was lying right on the surface, where it had been washed out of a sand roadbed by recent rains. It did take a sharp eye to spot it against the grey sand, but
I always keep a sharp eye on any bare earth in historic places.

I thought it was a modern Lincoln cent at first, because I didn’t have my glasses on. But when I picked it up, I immediately knew it was too thick and too heavy to be a modern cent. In fact, since I’m a part-time world coin dealer and an avid collector of Roman coins, I knew right away what it was, though I was completely dumbfounded as to how it got there.

Though it lay on top of the ground, I do not believe it was recently lost by a collector. Not a modern collector, anyway. I think it was in the ground for at least 150 to 200 years, judging from the context of the site where I found it. Other artifacts were in that washout. I had picked up a gunflint from a flintlock musket and some old pieces of plantation-era pottery moments before.

I have two pet theories. Either it was lost by an early collector (a famous 19th century antiquarian happened to have lived nearby), or it came over a bit before that- maybe on a ship from England during the colonial era, where such coins are commonly found. In the early days of the American colonies, small change was scarce, so people spent just about any kind of coin they could get their hands on. This might have circulated as a farthing (a quarter of a penny) in the 1700s, and nobody would have given it much thought at the time.

Sixteen centuries have taken their toll on this piece, but it still has some clear details. The obverse (or “heads” side) bears a portrait of the emperor. The reverse shows him standing with a globe in his left hand and something else, perhaps a military standard, on his right. The inscription GLORIA ROMANORVM (“Glory of the Romans”) is quite readable on the reverse.

So I’ll bet you think this coin is worth an emperor’s ransom, eh? Think again. Monetarily, it’s worth maybe ten bucks, tops. On a good day. I've bought better Roman bronzes for five bucks. Though certifiably ancient, these are very common coins … in Europe and the Middle East, where vast hoards are found.

But here in Georgia, in an American archaeological context? Not so much. Here, it is a truly amazing (and anomalous) find. Was I disappointed that it’s not worth a fortune? Nope. I was thrilled and fascinated ... and a bit baffled, too. If only it could talk!

 

BTW, experts, if you can confirm and/or correct my Arcadius attribution and the approximate dating on this piece, please do. It was something of a "semi-educated guess".

It's AE2 sized, BTW.

 

Crazy that my oldest coin find was here in GA, not England, and that it was an "eyeball" find made while doing a cursory site walk. As mentioned, I didn't even have the detector along that day. But on these old colonial sites, I've long learned to keep an eagle eye on the dirt, especially where it's been turned over or washed out, as in this case.

A buddy of mine "eyeballed" an 1830s Bust half dime on one site. Twice I've found Buffalo nickels that way.

 

I too subscribe to the ballast theory, regarding the Arcadius coin I found.

A friend of mine found a 1797 Cartwheel penny in a ballast pile near here.

I look forward to reading about the hoard posted above, but am too exhausted right now. Only have about 3.14 brain cells functioning right now after having worked all night. (That would be 3 if I lived in Indiana.)

 

I finally got around to submitting the copy in the OP to our local newspaper, The Brunswick News.

The reporter botched some of the details about the coin itself and made the article more about me than the find, but hey, she did the best she could as a non-numismatist, and it got enough interest to be on Page 1 below the fold, so that's cool.

At a company Christmas party yesterday, the CEO of the company my wife and I work for came up to me and obviously knew who I was, since he said he'd read about me in the paper. I mentioned that they'd misquoted a few things and he laughed and said, "Welcome to MY world!". So that was neat.

Brunswick Resident Unearths Roman Coin In Georgia
By Lindsey Adkison, The Brunswick News, Saturday, December 10, 2016.​

OK, so she flubbed the math (though I might've been the one who inadvertently said "1700 years old" instead of "1600" during our phone conversation), they omitted the photo, she had me determining "that it was a 1/4 penny" (sic), though I merely said it might have circulated as a substitute for a farthing in colonial times- not that it is a farthing (that distinction will be lost on 95% of the general public, including our reporter), and worse, said I "started digging", which I most certainly did NOT, next to a colonial cemetery! (This was a surface find that had been washed out by the rain.) Also, all mention of the emperor Arcadius was lost, making this article pretty nonsensical, in the numismatic sense.

But she tried. Give her a C or a C+ for getting most of the facts straight. You can compare the article to my copy above to see what got garbled.

 

BTW, since the cat's out of the bag now, I can share a picture of the site. If you were to draw a hypothetical "X" about an inch or two below the bottom right corner of the photograph below, the coin was found about there, in a washout from the sand road outside the southern gates of the old walled cemetery.

Buried within the cemetery are some Revolutionary War heroes, one of whom was (I believe) Teddy Roosevelt's ancestor. Across the road is the old Midway Congregational Church. The present building dates from the 1790s, as the British burned the previous one during the Revolution. During the Civil War, Federal troops quartered livestock and horses inside the cemetery enclosure. There is also a quaint old ghost story about how one of the slaves building the brick wall in the early 1800s killed his coworker with a brick and buried the body beneath the wall. A large crack formed in the wall there, visible from the church side. (Almost certainly utter hogwash, of course, but a fun story nonetheless.)

From the artifacts found next to the coin in the washout (NOT by digging!), I deduce that the coin was dropped there in the colonial period or the early antebellum period, as determined by the gunflint and pottery I found with it.


Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)