Archaeologists are baffled but excited to discover two silver coins from the Roman Empire on a remote island in the Baltic Sea, halfway between Sweden and Estonia.
There is no evidence revealing how the coins got there, but they may have been left by Norse merchants, lost in a shipwreck or brought there on a Roman ship that traveled far north.
Johann Ronby (Opens in a new tab)An archaeologist at Sodertorn University in Stockholm, he was part of the team that found the coins with metal detectors in March, at a beach site marked by ancient hearths on the island of Gotska Sandun.
“We were so happy,” he told Live Science. “We have this site, but we don’t know what it is. But now that we have the coins there, it makes it more interesting to keep excavating it.”
Roman coins
The silver coins found on the island are both Roman “denarii”. – One is from the reign of Emperor Trajan, between 98 and 117 AD, and the other is from the reign of Emperor Antoninus Pius, between 138 and 161 AD.
They each weigh less than an eighth of an ounce (4 grams) and would have represented a day’s wages for a laborer when they were minted.
The denarius was the standard currency of ancient Rome, and its name is still found today in the word “money” in many Latin-based languages, such as “denaro” in Italian and “deniro” in Spanish.
The coins of the Roman Empire, Ronpei said, could have remained in circulation for a long time, because the silver they contained had always remained valuable; They may have been brought to Gotska Sandun by Norse merchants who had taken refuge there from storms at sea.
But it’s also possible they were carried there by survivors of a shipwreck: The waters around the island are notoriously dangerous, and the area is strewn with debris, he said.
Another possibility is that the Romans took the coins to Gotska Sandun on a Roman ship, although there are no records of such a voyage to the Baltic Sea.
“It’s not likely to be a Roman ship,” said Ronpei. “But you also have to bear in mind that the Romans were sailing to Scotland and so forth, and that there were Roman writers at that time writing about the Baltics.”
Baltic Island
Roman coins have also been found on the larger island of Gotland about 25 miles (40 km) to the south, but that might have been to be expected since it was the site of several towns. However, there are no towns or villages in Gotska Sandun.
Gotska Sandun – meaning ‘island of sand’ – is uninhabited today but was home to the lighthouse keepers in the 19th century. Before that, Runpei said, it was known as a place of shipwrecks and a haunt of pirates.
Archaeologist Daniel Langhammer (Opens in a new tab)who oversees cultural heritage in Gotland County’s Gotska Sandun, told Live Science that the new finds echoed claims by a 19th-century lighthouse keeper to have found a Roman coin on the island.
But he said the mystery of how the coins arrived may never be resolved. “We just don’t know how they got there.”
The remote island was once frequented by seal hunters – seal hunting is now banned, but seals still exist – and anglers during the summer months, he said.
Ronby and his colleagues, including Sabine Steen, an osteopathic scientist at Uppsala University, will return to the site later this year. They eventually hope to reconstruct the history of the remote island.
