Creating a corpus of ancient coin finds from Belgium
NuMAD (Belgium) is a collaborative project to build an online database of finds of coins and other numismatic objects, from the Iron Age to the early Merovingian era. It is not intended as a Belgian Portable Antiquities Scheme, as exist in the UK and the Netherlands, that have a much broader scope (not limited to numismatic finds) and aim to register finds by non-affiliated detectorists.
Instead, we focus on finds recorded during archaeological projects (including surveys) or reported by trusted metal detectorists collaborating with archaeologists. While we hope to expand the project in the future, our focus is primarily on legacy data, mostly but not exclusivly unpublished.
The first phase runs from 2024-2027. During this first round we aim to complete the database infrastructure and incorporate three large batches of finds:
- the 'Lallemand inventory'
- the Ben Hellings database
- the Verboven database
1. The Lallemand inventory
This is the largest and by far most complicated 'chunk' we will incorporate during this first fase. It is essentially bringing online the results of a previous long-running project at the Royal Library, from 1960 until 1988 that aimed at cleaning, identifying, inventorizing and eventually publish all finds of coins and coin hoards from the Iron Age to the Merovingian period found in Belgium.
The project was initiated by Jacqueline Lallemand (1928-1995) assisted by Marcel Thirion (1925-1977). After her retirement in 1988 Lallemand continued to work on the inventory as a voluntary collaborator at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels. She was joined there by Johan van Heesch in 1991, who took the inventory back to the Royal Library after Lallemand died in 1995.
The coins came from archaeological excavations conducted by various professional institution in Belgium (National Excavation Agency, universities, museums, regional archaeological authorities). But the finds included also stray finds by individuals, and additional information from older publciations and museum collections.
The inventory existed as standardizes notes on typed pages, listing all finds organised by municipality and find spots. In 2017 the DIGIT department at the Royal Library scanned and 'transferred' these notes to a CVS format, numbering in total 24,225 records, many of which contain multiple incompletely identified coins. Almost none of these coins was ever pubolished.
The result, unfortunately, was plagued with numerous errors both in transferring the data to the correct columns and in reading the typed notes, sometimes with hand-written additions and corrections. NuMAD will clean up the records and format the fields to fit with modern archaeological and numismatic standards, primarily those developed in the framework of the Nomisma project.
2. The Ben Hellings database
This database was compiled for Ben's PhD dissertation. It cointains both hoards and single finds. The hoards were later included in the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project of the Ashmolean Museum and the Oxford Roman Economy Project. The database has 7275 records, totalling 122,767 individual coins of which 10,079 'Enzelfunde'. Since we limit NuMAD to 'small' hoards of maximum 500 coins the total number is limited to 27,050 coins from hoards and 10,079 from single finds. The overlap with the Lallemand in inventory is significant, but not total. While most coins of the Lallemand inventory are also in the Hellings database, the former meticulously provides all identifiable details of the individual coins, while the latter is limited to stated authorites, dates, Reece periodes, mints, metals and denominations.
3. The Verboven database
This is the smallest but also the most recent database. It consists 2059 records of individual coins.The overlap with the Lallemand inventory is small (c. 220 coins). The bulk of the coins (c. 90%) come from recent finds during archaeological projects of by trusted detectorists.
Result "NuMAD 2028"
At the completion of the first phase the integrated total will comprise close to 40,000 records of individual coin finds. They will all known numismatic details of these coins and the conditions of their loss or deposition, and their discovery.