The search for the origin of Stonehenge’s mysterious Altar Stone intensifi
Source: 9News
The site includes the typical features of an ancient Greek city, such as a theatre, temples, townhouses and a marketplace. Notion sat largely untouched and unexplored for thousands of years until about a decade ago when Ratté and a team of researchers began the process of aerial surveying and mapping the visible remains of the city found to be from the Hellenistic era (323 BCE to 30 BCE).
But when the researchers started their excavation in 2022, aiming to study the remains not visible above ground, they made a thrilling discovery: Under the foundation of a large courtyard townhouse from the Hellenistic era were the remains of an older house with pottery fragments within its walls dating to the fifth century BCE, according to the release. The researchers then found the hoard of coins buried beneath the floor in the older house.
The artifacts tell the story of those residing in the city not just during the period between Alexander the Great’s reign and the Roman Empire but also of hundreds of years earlier, when tension was high between the Greek civilisation and the Persian Empire.
The newly found coins are from the reign of the Persian Empire (sixth century BCE to about 330 BCE) and are known as Persian darics for the kneeling archer on the front of the coin that depicts Persian King Darius. Like most ancient coins from the sixth to fourth century BCE, this currency does not have dates on it, posing a challenge for researchers looking to pinpoint when it was produced, said Dr Peter van Alfen, chief curator at the American Numismatic Society, who was not part of the excavation.
“Several enormous hoards of darics have been found in the past, numbering thousands of coins, but these were not found by archaeologists, so the coins were dispersed and the hoard context (was) lost forever,” van Alfen said in an email.
“The fact that this daric hoard was found in a controlled archaeological excavation is rare. … The (archaeological) context of this hoard could provide an absolute dating peg for certain types of darics.”
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