For thirty years, two treasure hunters walked the Channel Island again and again jersey and found nothing but a few scattered tiny coins. Suddenly, in May 2012, their devices struck a field. The treasure hunters just did a little digging, found metal and reported the site to the local museum.
After the first excavations, it quickly became clear that they largest Celtic hoard of coins had discovered in the world. Tens of thousands of pieces of metal, some tiny, had corroded together into a block 1.4 meters long and 15 centimeters thick.
In years of detailed work, scientists and volunteers under the direction of conservator Neil Mahrer began in 2014 to separate, clean and document each coin individually from the treasure. The find was named Le Câtillon II after its provenance. Le Catillon I was also discovered on the island in the 1950s.
The task of comparing the coins with each other and finding out how many of them come from the same coinage fell to the numismatist Philip de Jersey to. He began this monumental project in a very traditional way with pairwise optical comparison.
Since 2021, however, he has received digital support from Germany. David Wigg-Wolf and Karsten Tolle want to start the scientific project clarenet Use machine learning pattern recognition to better categorize coins. We talked to both of them on our podcast.
With our podcast To know better we provide entertaining information about technology and science topics. We talk to the Golem.de editorial team and conduct interviews with external experts. In each episode we take up a specific topic and examine it from different perspectives. We release new episodes of weekly To know better on Golem.de, but these are also on the platforms Spotify, Google Podcasts, deezer, Apple Podcasts and Podigee to find; the feed is here. Subscribers will get access to the current episode as soon as we release it.
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