Archaeologists Unearth Rare Trove of Silver Coins on Mediterranean Island
The 27 Roman denarii found on the island of Pantelleria date back more than 2,000 years
:focal(962x1086:963x1087)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/6a/27/6a2756c1-a239-44f6-9ef1-9f76096b1ef8/coin3.jpg)
Archaeologists discovered a trove of rare silver coins on a small, remote island in the Mediterranean, Sicilian officials announced last week.
The 27 coins were all identified as denarii, a type of silver coin introduced in 211 B.C.E. and used in ancient Rome for hundreds of years. Researchers say the newly discovered denarii were minted between 94 B.C.E. and 74 B.C.E.
The treasure was unearthed on Pantelleria, a small island off the southern coast of Italy. According to CBS News’ Emily Mae Czachor, archaeologists found the coins stashed inside a hole in the wall while performing cleaning and restoration work on the Acropolis of Santa Teresa and San Marco, which is part of the Archaeological Park of Selinunte, Cave di Cusa and Pantelleria. Per Reuters’ Marta Di Donfrancesco, the park, one of the largest archaeological sites of its kind in the Mediterranean, contains the ruins of an ancient Greek colony.
According to the announcement, the researchers first spotted some of the coins in soil that had been loosened by rain. Later, after digging underneath a nearby boulder, they found the rest of the trove. Following their discovery, the coins were cleaned and restored.
The team was led by Thomas Schäfer, an archaeologist at Germany’s University of Tübingen who has been conducting excavations in the area for more than two decades. Schäfer says in the announcement that the site had been untouched for hundreds of years, preserving numerous intact artifacts and structures.
In 2010, a different set of ancient coins—a trove of 107 silver denarii—was discovered on the same island. A few years before that, three marble busts of Caesar, Agrippina and Titus were also unearthed on Pantelleria.
The newly discovered coins date to the Roman Republic, which lasted from around 509 B.C.E. to 27 B.C.E. During this period, Rome was ruled by a republican government that vested power in senators and other officials rather than kings. It ended with the establishment of the Roman Empire in 27 B.C.E.
“This discovery ... offers valuable information for the reconstruction of the events, trade contacts and political relations that marked the Mediterranean in the Republican age,” says Francesco Paolo Scarpinato, a regional councilor for cultural heritage, in a statement, per a translation by Reuters.
Silver denarius coins are rare, but researchers have discovered several examples of them in different parts of the world in recent years. In 2021, archaeologists digging in Augsburg, Germany, discovered a huge collection of over 5,500 Roman denarius coins. Around the same time, researchers in the ancient Turkish city of Aizanoi discovered a cache of 651 Roman coins, approximately 439 of which were denarii.
Not all of the recent Roman coin discoveries were made by archaeologists. Last year, an 8-year-old boy named Bjarne was playing in a sandbox at his elementary school in Bremen, Germany, when he discovered a denarius minted 1,800 years ago.