Le Catillon II: conserving the world’s largest Iron Age hoard

Abstract

AbstractIn early 2012, two amateur metal detectorists in the British Channel Isle of Jersey discovered the Le Catillon II Iron Age hoard. This contained over sixty-nine thousand coins, eight complete gold torques and numerous other pieces of jewellery. The hoard appears to have been buried around 30-40BCE by the Coriosolitae tribe from the nearby French coast and is the largest Celtic hoard ever discovered. It was excavated intact and transferred to a conservation laboratory on the island. Here it was decided to disassemble the hoard and record its contents at a level of detail never attempted before. A computer controlled six axis metrology arm with a contact probe point head was used to record the position of every coin and other item to a sub centimetre accuracy before removal. A laser scanner was also used to record the entire hoard at various stages of disassembly. In this way, a complete three-dimensional virtual map of the hoard contents was created. Work is now being done to link this map to the object database so that it may be interrogated for distributions of different ages, types, makers of coins etc.