Internship at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

by Samuel Oer de Almeida,

Main entrance of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford

I am currently an undergraduate student of Classical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. In August 2017, I completed an internship at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the Heberden Coin Room in Oxford. During my two-week stay I participated in the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire Project, which aims at collecting information about all coin hoards in the Roman Empire between 30 BC and AD 400 and making it publicly available for further studies through a digital database. The project intends to fill the major lacuna in digital coverage and documentation of ancient coin hoards.

Me while working on the coin hoards of Pompeii

During my internship I mainly devoted myself to the coin hoards of Pompeii, which are of particular significance since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 forms a fixed terminus ante quem for the dating of these hoards. Furthermore, the good state of preservation of the city allows the investigation of the largely undisturbed archaeological contexts of the deposited coins. Pompeii therefore provides an authentic picture of the deposition behaviour of its inhabitants, which can be placed into a broader perspective, for example in comparison to the coin hoards of other Campanian cities, like Herculaneum. I completed the processing of the hoards of Pompeii regio IX and several hoards of regio VI at the level of the individual coin, and made them publicly available online through the project’s web application (for an example of a presumed coin hoard of Pompeii found in regio IX, insula 14, in an atrium of a Roman residential building, click here). In addition, I helped to review the data of over 80,000 coins of the Reka Devnia hoard from northeastern Bulgaria, as well as improving the project’s guidance for contributors.

I would like to thank the Royal Numismatic Society, which made my internship at the Ashmolean Museum possible by a grant of the Classical Numismatic Group Roman and Byzantine Fund, Professor Christopher Howgego and Dr Stefan Krmnicek for giving me the opportunity to work at one of the leading international coin cabinets and the academic staff at the Heberden Coin Room, especially Dr Simon Glenn, who kindly introduced me into the department and helpfully accompanied my work.