Southern England's Best Historical Object

Keble Research Associate in Archaeology, Dr Tom Higham, appeared this week on the BBC, taking part in a search to identify the "best historical object" in southern England, part of a project linked to the BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects. Tom discussed objects in the Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean Museums, before finally choosing a Roman coin from the Ashmolean as his favoured object. The coin was unearthed in Finstock in Oxfordshire over 150 years ago and is a gold ‘aureus’ of c.AD 70 in the name of the Roman emperor Vespasian, and it is unique. Unusually for any Roman gold, and surprisingly for a coin found in Britain, the coin was struck in the east, probably in Judaea or Syria, at about the time of the Roman sack of Jerusalem in AD 70 (when the Temple was destroyed), and Tom suggests that the gold of which the coin was made may have been  taken from the Temple itself.