The mystery of Roman coins discovered on remote Baltic Sea island

Archaeologists are scratching their heads over how two Roman coins recently discovered on a remote Baltic sea island ended up there.

Researchers from Södertörn University carrying out excavations on Gotska Sandön, an uninhabited island between Sweden and Estonia, unearthed the silver denarii coins, one depicting the emperor Trajan, who ruled at the height of the empire from AD98-117, and the other showing Antoninus Pius, who reigned as emperor from AD138 to 161. Team leader Johan Rönnby, a professor of marine archaeology, said the finds, at a beach site, “raise several questions”.

The area now known as Gotland County in central Sweden was believed to have been inhabited by a North Germanic tribe, and “contact with the Romans was limited”, said Heritage Daily, although “archaeological evidence does indicate an emerging trading network for the latest Roman fashions”.

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The Romans sailed as far as Scotland and documented the Baltic area, but “there are no historical records of their voyages that describes the island, making it uncertain whether they were the ones who brought the coins there”, the history site added.

With “no evidence as to how the coins got there”, said The Science Times, researchers have theorised that they might been left by Norse traders, lost in a shipwreck or brought on a Roman ship that voyaged to the far north.

When the coins were brought to the island is also impossible to say, according to Rönnby, who “said coins from the Roman Empire could have stayed in circulation for a long time, because the silver they contained always remained valuable”, Live Science reported. The denarii was the standard coin of Ancient Rome and “their name survives today in the word for ‘money’ in several Latin-based languages, such as ‘denaro’ in Italian and ‘dinero’ in Spanish”.

The newly discovered coins each weigh around four grams, which would have represented about a day’s pay for a labourer when they were minted.