October 29th, 2008 by Philippa Walton

I’ve just got back from the ICOMON* conference in Utrecht where I gave a short paper about the potential of the Portable Antiquities Scheme Roman coin data. Despite sudden nerves nearly getting the better of me when I stood up to talk and realised the assembled audience knew an awful lot about Roman coins, the paper seemed to go down ok – well, no one said what I was doing was a waste of time! It was all part of an interesting session exploring the different databases used to record site finds and hoard coins throughout Europe. Unsurprisingly, there are a quite lot of them, although none are as developed and as useful as the PAS database and not all are accessible online. At the moment, it would be a struggle to do similar research to mine in other European countries so I count myself rather lucky.

Other highlights of the conference included watching Euros being minted, hearing of another riverine Roman deposit (this time in Verona) which might be a good parallel for Piercebridge in County Durham and eating my way through 500 Euro chocolate bank notes..Yum.

*ICOMON = The International Committee for Money and Banking Museums