Active History, Languages & Philosophy

Contextualising Roman coinage from Camulodunum: an exploration of economy and identity in Britannia’s first capital

Funder AHRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Leicester
Funding £112K
Period Sept 2025 — Sept 2029

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Nine thousand, seven hundred and forty-nine Roman coins from Colchester have sat unstudied in museum collections for decades, and this project will finally analyse them as a systematic dataset. The coins are the most common Roman artefact, yet the 9,749 held by Colchester Museums—combined with finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme and unpublished commercial excavation reports—have never been examined together. This gap matters because Camulodunum was Britain’s first Roman capital, a key site for understanding how the province formed. Without analysing its coinage, archaeologists have lacked a basic tool for tracing economic activity, social identity, and daily exchange across different communities inside and outside the ancient town. The project will apply identity theory to ask who used which coins, and how that varied between groups—soldiers, merchants, local Britons. It will also work with the Fitzwilliam Museum and modern Colchester residents through participatory practice, exploring what money means across time. This is fundamental historical research. It will not change infrastructure or medicine, but it will provide the first detailed picture of how a provincial Roman economy actually worked on the ground—something that, for most Roman towns in Britain, remains unknown.

View original technical description
An important Iron Age centre, then a Roman military installation and subsequently a major town, Camulodunum was integral to the foundation and development of the Roman province of Britannia. Yet despite its significance, much of its material culture remains understudied. Thousands of coins (the most ubiquitous of Roman artefacts) have been recovered from the town and its hinterland, but they have never been analysed in any detail. Our ground-breaking project will address this issue by exploring the function and use of coinage in Roman Colchester for the very first time. Using the 9,749 coins held by Colchester Museums in its core collection, alongside Portable Antiquities Scheme data, published site reports and commercial archaeological ‘grey literature’, it will ask what numismatic data can reveal about the identity and workings of Camulodunum as an early and emergent Roman provincial hub. This project will make innovative use of identity theory to explore engagement with coinage by a variety of users and will focus on comparing and contrasting experience amongst diverse communities both inside and outside the ancient city. Collaborating with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, it will also explore resonances of money with some of Colchester’s modern inhabitants, through participatory practice.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Adrian Popescu (Co-Investigator)Philippa Walton (Principal Investigator)Sarah Scott (Co-Investigator)

Related Research

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Original classification

Training Grant

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