I just finished reading that from another board's link. Very cool, I would love to have found something like that. Thats alot of damn coins. I doubt they will put all of it in a museum but it will take a long while before they "may" be sold to some collectors.
Thanks for the link. That's a very exciting find. The BBC link contains a short video. Do the scenes which show the coins laid out on trays in a lab show the conservation process? About to be cleaned? Does anyone know what process they are using to clean them? It looks like they were cleaning them en masse as opposed to individually. It is common practice to do it this way and is this process common to cleaning ancients?
I'd say 95-99% of them will likely make it to market. Under British law, the local museums get first pick to buy at fair market value. But it's unlikely they'll find much they'll feel they must have -- maybe a few specimens, but not much more. They're already well stocked in Roman coins. The rest go back to the man who discovered them to dispose of as he likes. Unless he's such a huge collector of third and fourth century bronzes that he wants to own 52k of them, he'll go to some of the UK dealers to help unload them. I'm sure he's already been contacted by many of them in anticipation of when he'll be getting his horde back from the museum curators. England has one of the best systems in the world for dealing with antiquity finds and more countries should use them as a model, rather than getting all in a tizzy about "cultural heritage" issues when it comes to something as common as ancient coins -- particularly Romans.
