In Dorset, Great Britain, a 90-year-old man made a unique archaeological find that may shed new light on the ritual practices of the ancient Celts. While searching with a metal detector near the town of Cranborne, a pensioner accidentally came across a treasure of 67 silver coins of the Durotrig tribe. The value of the find, according to experts, is more than 20 thousand pounds (approximately 27 thousand dollars). This discovery was reported by the publication Daily Echo.
As the finder himself said, it all started with the discovery of an ordinary penny from the time of Queen Victoria, but soon his device gave a signal near a wire fence. The owner of the site removed the wire, and this made it possible to get to the main part of the treasure – dozens of coins that had been lying in the ground for more than two millennia.
The find contains coins of the Celtic Durothrig tribe, which inhabited the southern part of the British Isles before the conquest by the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD. According to auction expert Alice Cullen, the coins had almost no traces of circulation, which may indicate their purely ritual purpose – they were probably offerings to the gods during religious ceremonies.
Photo: Daily Echo
This unique treasure will be auctioned on May 29. Organizers expect the auction to bring in at least 20,000 pounds. Thus, the find will not only add to the collections of numismatists, but may also significantly affect our understanding of the spiritual life of the Celtic tribes.
Other sensational discoveries made by British pensioners have already been reported. In particular, 70-year-old John Turner accidentally found a rare silver coin from 1813 – a New South Wales 15 pence – among a bag of donations. And in Louisville, USA, a statue of a Greek god was discovered just in the yard of one of the residents, which disappeared almost 30 years ago.
