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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;EWC3, post: 3166292, member: 93416&quot;]I agree with many others - a great write up Valentinian (on a period I do not much know myself)</p><p><br /></p><p>This is a suggestion/request for your thoughts on a relatively related but slightly earlier matter - the many huge hoards of late 3rd century radiates and why they exist?</p><p><br /></p><p>I notice the Frome hoard has come up in discussion many times on this group, but as far as I can see, there are issues about it that concern me that have not yet been aired.</p><p><br /></p><p>There was much celebration from archaeological sources when the Frome hoard came up, with claims that archaeology would use it to give us new insights on later Roman rural life.&nbsp; The ideas we actually got were from Sam Moorhead - that the Frome hoard was some kind of ritual deposit.&nbsp; This got the (perhaps more cautious) backing of Roger Bland - so is more or less the BM line on the coins.&nbsp; Further, they raised a whopping GBP 600K to test the hypothesis further elsewhere.</p><p><br /></p><p>As I said, this is not really my area, but all the same, I could see nothing plausible about the Moorhead suggestion, which seems to me more to do with a modern archaeological obsession with ritual than anything else.&nbsp; (I wrote voicing some objections to Moorhead but go no reply.&nbsp; I challenged him at a public meet, and afterwards challenged both Moorhead and Bland in the pub, and still got no convincing reply.)</p><p><br /></p><p>At the same meet, Nick Mayhew mentioned that Chris Howgego at Oxford had got independent funding to look at the same sort of problem.&nbsp; I always found Howgego to be a sensible guy, so I rather hoped to see an alternative approach appearing, but that was a few years back and I heard nothing since (its not really my area, as I said).</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyhow, my own hunch, as usually, is to go down the economic route.&nbsp; That the guy who buried the Frome hoard did so for Gresham reasons - because he thought the coins were being undervalued by some reforms brought in around the time of Diocletian.&nbsp; This could be because he correctly understood the silver content of the &quot;average radiate&quot; or because he mistakenly understood it.&nbsp; Both would work.</p><p><br /></p><p>But you know these coins much better than me Valentinian, so - what did you make of this?</p><p><br /></p><p>Apologies if you already covered this elsewhere and I missed it, (or if I ought to have started a new &quot;Where Frome?&quot; thread)</p><p><br /></p><p>Rob T[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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