{"id":28632,"date":"2026-06-30T18:16:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T18:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/28632\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T18:16:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T18:16:14","slug":"archaeologists-in-france-dig-up-a-jar-packed-with-tens-of-thousands-of-1800-year-old-roman-coins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/28632\/","title":{"rendered":"Archaeologists in France Dig Up a Jar Packed With Tens of Thousands of 1,800-Year-Old Roman Coins"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>A jug holding a vast number of Roman coins was found during an excavation at a French village.\u00a0Credit: Simon\u00a0Ritz\/Inrap<\/p>\n

Archaeologists in northeastern France have uncovered an ancient neighborhood beneath the town of Senon, where they found three ceramic jars filled with Roman coins. The hoard is huge, numbering at least 25,000 bronze and copper coins from the 3rd-century CE. The discovery was made during a routine excavation. Now, the surprising find offers new insight into how people in the late Roman Empire stored and managed their money.<\/p>\n

The dig, led by France\u2019s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research<\/a> (INRAP), spans 1,500 square meters. It has peeled back the layers of Senon\u2019s past, revealing how the settlement evolved from a Gallic village into a thriving Roman town\u2014and how, eventually, it vanished in fire.<\/p>\n

A City From Before Rome<\/p>\n

At the lowest layers of the site, archaeologists uncovered traces of old buildings, such as pits, ditches, and postholes that once supported wooden walls and clay structures. According to INRAP, the tightly packed structures\u2014sometimes more than one structure per square meter\u2014show that Senon was already a densely built settlement before the Roman conquest. <\/p>\n

These traces date to between the mid\u20132nd century BCE, when the region belonged to the Mediomatrici<\/a>, a Celtic people whose capital was at Divodurum Mediomatricorum, modern-day Metz, France.<\/p>\n

After the Romans under Julius Caesar conquered the Gauls, everything changed and Senon entered a new phase of expansion. Archaeologists identified more than a dozen small limestone quarries, some nearly three meters deep, carved behind houses and later repurposed for storage or domestic use. These extraction pits fueled a construction boom that lasted centuries.<\/p>\n

\"The\"The<\/a>The floor of a hypocaust (an ancient Roman heating system), made of reused tiles, surmounting an abandoned cellar, illustrates the reconfigurations of the district during Late Antiquity. Credit: Simon\u00a0Ritz\/Inrap<\/p>\n

By the late first century CE, Senon\u2019s recently excavated neighborhood took on its enduring shape. Two paved streets bordered rows of stone houses with lime floors, hypocaust heating, ovens, and cellars. Courtyards spread out behind them, sometimes used for workshops. The well-built houses and everyday objects found on the site suggest that Senon\u2019s residents at the site were relatively well-off, likely artisans or merchants.<\/p>\n

But the good times didn\u2019t last long. Layers of ash tell of fires that swept through the district. One blaze around the early 4th century marks a turning point. It was during this turbulent time\u2014perhaps between 280 and 310 CE\u2014that someone buried three large amphorae of coins beneath their floorboards.<\/p>\n

The Mystery of the Hidden Coins<\/p>\n

Each vessel lay sunk into the ground, their necks level with the floor. Inside were tens of thousands of bronze and copper coins bearing the faces of emperors like Victorinus, Tetricus I, and Tetricus II, the rulers of the short-lived Gallic Empire that broke away from Rome in the 3rd century. <\/p>\n

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\u201cThe first hoard held an estimated 83 pounds (38 kilograms) of coins, which corresponds to approximately 23,000 to 24,000 coins,\u201d Vincent Genevi\u00e8ve, an INRAP numismatist, told Live Science<\/a>. Another amphora may have contained up to 19,000 more.<\/p>\n

Altogether, the hoards could exceed 40,000 coins, enough to pay dozens of soldiers for months. But archaeologists caution against seeing them as emergency stashes. \u201cContrary to what one might think at first look, it is not certain that these are \u2018treasures\u2019 that were hidden during a period of insecurity,\u201d according to the translated INRAP statement<\/a>. Instead, the vessels may have functioned as household banks\u2014places where money was stored, withdrawn, and redeposited over time.<\/p>\n

The evidence supports this view. In two cases, archaeologists found coins stuck to the outside of the jars, indicating someone added them after burying the vessels but before sealing the pits. The openings of the jars remained accessible from the floor above. <\/p>\n

Nearby stood a Roman fortification dating from the same period, just 150 meters away. Soldiers or local administrators may have helped manage the deposits. <\/p>\n

Fire, Abandonment, and Rediscovery<\/p>\n

\"A\"A<\/a>A hypocaust, an underfloor heating system, in one of the ancient houses. Credit: Lino Mocci\/Inrap<\/p>\n

The blaze that consumed Senon\u2019s homes at the start of the 4th century spared no one. Yet residents rebuilt. Old cellars were reused, broken columns and temple stones repurposed into new walls. The reused materials suggest that residents had already abandoned the city\u2019s major public buildings. For another half-century, life flickered on in this patchwork town.<\/p>\n

Then, sometime around the middle of the 4th century, flames returned. This time, the inhabitants did not come back. The houses collapsed, their courtyards filled with rubble. The coin hoards\u2014once easily reachable\u2014were buried deeper and forgotten. Over the centuries, orchards grew above them. By the 18th century, the site was farmland. Only today, as modern construction expands, has the ancient neighborhood emerged again.<\/p>\n

Story update: Since the initial unearthing of the staggering ~40,000 Roman coins beneath Senon, French heritage laws swiftly placed the massive 3rd-century hoard under state ownership, and the thousands of bronze and copper pieces were transported for painstaking cleaning and numismatic analysis. Because the discovery was part of a \u201cpreventive excavation\u201d triggered by a homeowner\u2019s plan to expand his property, researchers at the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) worked quickly to digitally preserve the ancient, 1,500-square-meter neighborhood in 3D. With the coins safely removed and the digital blueprint secured, the excavation site has now been filled in and returned to the homeowner.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in December 2025 and was updated with new information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A jug holding a vast number of Roman coins was found during an excavation at a French village.\u00a0Credit:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[17422,20062,4727,27],"class_list":["post-28632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rome","tag-ancient-coins","tag-inrap","tag-roman-empire","tag-rome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}