For our February session we were visited by Laura Burnett from the Southwest Heritage Trust.  Laura is a finds expert who specialises in coins and in this session we were looking at the ways coins can help archaeologists.  After an introductory talk by Laura, we split up into three groups and took it in turns carrying out three different activities.

One activity was to design our own coins.  Laura provided photos of coins to give our MAYANS inspiration, e.g. Roman coins, trade tokens and coins of historical British monarchs.  We talked about who or what we would put on our coins and what message that would represent.

The second activity was about different ways of imprinting the designs onto coins by hammering and screw press.  We hand hammered a coin die into playdough disks and then compared this methods to using a screw press to imprint designs into chocolate coins.  Great fun!

For the third activity we talked about what archaeologists can learn by studying coins, e.g. dating a site, trading, status and coin hoards.

This was a really interesting and fun session!  A big thank you to Laura for running it for us.