Julia Tubman, conservator, British Museum As mentioned in
previous blog posts, the Beau Street Hoard is not just one huge
jumbled mass of coins, but actually at least six separate bags.
My excavation plan is to remove these coins bag by bag, to
preserve the groupings (which are potentially very significant),
and give us a clearer view of the size and shape of each bag. I
had been concerned that the coins might have concreted together
to such an extent that identifying separate bags would be very
difficult during the excavation, but (fingers crossed!) thus far
the removal of individual bags has progressed remarkably
smoothly. I have managed to retrieve two whole bags of coins. I
have numbered these bags five and six, and they are the two
smallest bags at the northern end of the block in the x-ray
(five being the smallest). We were excited to see that bag six
almost exclusively contained denarii (the smaller coins with a
high silver content discussed in Eleanor’s blog post last week),
suggesting that the coins