Online launch of Iron Age coins database
Academic researchers and those involved in identifying the finds will be delighted to learn that the Celtic Coin Index (CCI) – the world’s largest dataset of Iron Age coins in Britain – is now available as an online resource through the Celtic Coin Index Digital (CCID).
Iron Age coins circulated in Britain from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD, primarily in the southern and eastern parts of England. Many feature intriguing designs and inscriptions, making them important sources of information for understanding the society, trade and culture of the pre-Roman period.
The most important collection of information on these elements is the CCI, which now contains nearly 85,000 records relating to approximately 68,000 specimens. Founded as an extensive index card archive by Derek Allen and Sheppard Frere at University College London in 1961, the collection was transferred to Oxford University in 1964, and since then has been accessible in person at the University Institute of Archaeology, and various online forms.
The CCID is, however, more technologically advanced than its predecessors. Created by a team of researchers working at the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum and the American Numismatic Society (ANS), the new electronic resource offers digitized versions of all physical record cards from the ICC and some of their associated images and data. Crucially, all of this has been published online using state-of-the-art open-source software derived from the Numishare platform (created by Ethan Gruber of ANS), which means that the CCID is fully searchable and capable manage complex queries. Additionally, this new online collection has been linked to other coin databases around the world, through a sister website, Iron Age Coins in Britain (IACB; https://iacb.arch.ox. ac.uk), which uses stable numismatics. linked open data identifiers and methodologies established by the Nomisma.org project to enable information from diverse collections to be gathered, explored and visualized in one place.
The CCID, which was built with the financial support of the Royal Numismatic Society, the British Numismatic Society and the Barclay Head Fund at the University of Oxford, as well as a number of private donors, can be found at : https://cci.arch.ox.ac.uk.