Coins

Central Germany in general and Saxony-Anhalt in particular are among the regions with the most finds of a number of kinds in all of Central Europe. It has been an economic centre of the German-speaking region since the Middle Ages.

The abundance of raw materials in the silver and copper mines also fueled coin production, trade and thus money circulation. To a certain extent, these regions were a kind of "melting pot" for cultural, economic and political exchange.

Such general conditions predestine this area today for an analysis of the currency geography with its once branched market and trading systems. In particular, because this historical area is characterized by its diverse character of small rulers.

Numismatics distinguishes between find and collection coins. Find coins were withdrawn from regular monetary circulation through loss or deliberate concealment. The findspot where they were found and, in the best case, the context of the archaeological findings are known. Collection or collector coins, as pure display pieces, have a much better degree of preservation, but they lack the archaeological context.

As authentic excerpts from historical monetary circulation, find coins enable research into the structure, volume and movement of coinage. Like hardly any other group of archaeological objects, they can be reliably mapped from production to disposal. Currency landscapes, i.e. the spatial usage radii of currency types and periods, can thus be reconstructed. Find coins allow conclusions to be drawn about the economy and trade of the time and provide insights into former settlement and social structures as well as burial and sacrificial customs.

The area of ​​influence of the respective mint authority in close proximity to their mints can be examined. Interrelationships with neighbouring areas can be examined in more detail since the exchange of money is not bound to national borders. Through repeated discovery and association in treasure troves, coins with no inscriptions in particular can be located in time and location. Large homogeneous hoard finds enable stamp studies to determine coin output and minting series.

Coins are small, light, can be classified precisely, and are very durable thanks to their material, making them a very easy-to-handle group of finds. They represent a comprehensive and self-contained source category. The best thing is that they can be dated reliably or even to the exact year and, as archaeological finds, can also narrow down the time period of archaeological find complexes.

Coins are the first means of mass communication in history to reach all social classes. Their symbolism in the motifs and legends depicted on both sides was mostly common. They reflect current events and society at the time and provide information about the editors' intentions. Whoever was allowed to mint coins held a significant position of power.

Coins are not just numismatic objects. They represent an important source for all historical research and its neighbouring disciplines, especially for those eras from which only a few written documents have survived. On the bracteate shown on the left you can see an abbess of the Quedlinburg imperial abbey, whose existence was only discovered in research on this one coin discovery.

The LDA Halle's entire archives and collections today include around 35 million archive items in the form of images, plans and written documents as well as around 16 million archaeological find complexes.

This also includes over 25,000 find coins from all periods, from the Roman Empire to today. The focus of these find coins is on Medieval and modern coins of the spiritual and secular rulers in Central Germany.

Over the course of a year, several hundred find coins can be found in the LDA through archaeological excavations or field finds by volunteer archaeologists.

Before the LDA's digitization projects began in 2017, the previous digital recording of coin holdings was limited to listing the coins in an internal location administration with only a little information about the individual item.

Numerous other coin holdings in Saxony-Anhalt are still waiting to be scientifically processed.

Almost all medium-sized and smaller museums in Saxony-Anhalt have more or less large collections of find coins that have so far been little or not at all indexed. Collections in smaller museums in particular are usually difficult to access and can be confusing.

As early as the 19th century, recovered hoards and treasure finds were often torn apart, sold to the highest bidder and are scattered accordingly today. Particularly in the case of these “old finds”, the context of the finds is often only partially preserved or is missing entirely due to changes in location, administrative structural changes and two world wars.

Some results can now be corrected with advanced research. Many coin finds, especially individual finds or smaller hoard finds, have not yet been published. Even if a complete survey was carried out in advance by dedicated numismatists, in the first decades of the 20th century only selective excerpts from hoards were often published in summarized journals.

Comparative scientific analyzes are made considerably more difficult by these desiderata.

When it comes to archaeological finds, it is common practice to label and to inventory them for later processing. However, a coin does not allow for direct marking because any form of inscription would always obscure parts of the minting. The relevant information is often included on a finds label and the coin itself is stored in bags or coin boxes.

But this is where the risk lies: During a loan or during scientific processing, individual coins can be mixed up or even lost. A possibility was therefore sought to enable exact identification of individual coins in another way.