The medieval Chinese coin discovered in England
Hello everyone in 2021! 😊I hope you are doing well and are ready for new archaeological curiosities! Today I’d like to finally leave 2020 behind and share with you a fresh discovery from the beginning of this year🎉
Just in early January, an English detectorist made a surprising discovery: he found an ancient Chinese coin on the territory of Hampshire. After careful examination of this 25mm copper alloy coin, archaeologists concluded that it dates back from the Northern Song Dynasty, that means from the early 11th century.
This discovery could be truly surprising given that the scientific evidence indicates that Chinese travelers didn’t reach Europe until the 13th / 14th century. However, as Dr. Caitlin Green (archaeologist, historian, author of many books and articles on Late Roman and Early Medieval Britain) wrote on her blog:
(…) It seems credible that this coin too could have been a medieval-era loss, and in this context it is worth noting that such Northern Song coins might quite credibly have arrived at any point up to perhaps the late fourteenth century, given that they continued to circulate in significant numbers well into that era.
While there is no reason not to trust this discovery, archeology knows many cases of forgery and counterfeit artifacts. After the first finding of Chinese coin in 2018, many historians doubted its truthfulness. However, discovery of a second similar coin increased the probability that both findings are genuine. As we can read on The Sunday Times website:
It is the second Chinese coin found in a medieval context in England and experts said that its discovery added weight to the idea that the two coins were genuine medieval losses and not dropped by modern collectors.
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That would be it for the first post in 2021. As always, I encourage you to explore the topic 👀
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