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A resident of a southwest German town working on a construction project unearthed a stash of medieval coins minted around 1320 AD.
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The value of the roughly 1,600 coins recovered was deemed enough to have purchased 150 sheep at the time.
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The coins span multiple mints through Germany, Switzerland, and France.
While laying down underground piping near a swimming pool, Claus Völker, a resident of German municipality Glottertal, found “small metal plates” in the earth as he was beginning his work, according to a translated statement from the State Office for Monument Preservation from the Stuttgart regional council.
Archaeologists descended on the site the same day, quickly uncovering roughly 1,000 coins. The next day, rain turned the soil into knee-deep mud, but the archaeologists armed themselves with metal detectors and still recovered approximately 600 additional metal coins.
Andreas Haasis-Berner, archaeologist with the State Office for Monument Preservation, said most of the coins are from the Breisach, Zofingen, and Freiburg mints, all created sometime around 1320 AD. The collection also includes isolated coins minted in Basel, St. Gallen, Zurich, Laufenburg, and Colmar.
Just how valuable was the collection at the time they were presumably lost in the German soil? “You could have bought about 150 sheep with the coins,” Haasis-Berner said in the statement.
The experts credit Völker’s attentiveness in the “discovery of one of the most extensive medieval coin treasures of the last few decades.” Without it, the coins would still just be a bunch of junk in the dirt.
The region the coins were found may hold additional hidden secrets based on the site’s past. “Glottertal has been one of the most important mining areas for the dukes of Freiburg,” Haasis-Berner said, according to Live Science. “The site where the coins were found was a main settlement area for miners.”
In 2016, in nearby Switzerland, more than 200 coins from the 1300s were discovered by chance in a forest near Zurich. Those coins were only enough to buy 25 sheep, however. These finds, along with others in the region, help tell a historic tale, sometimes of political instability or payments for mercenary armies.
Not only does the newfound coin stockpile give a jolt of excitement to the region and offer up a new trove to investigate, but it could lead to deeper understanding of the region at the time. “The evaluation of this coin treasure will enable statements to be made about the coin circulation in Breisgau, the minting activity in the mints, the silver trade, but also about the mining in the Glottertal,” Haasis-Berner said.
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