For those who have been following the progress of theconservation of the Beau Street Hoard on the blog, I am delightedto announce that all the coins - around 17,500 of them - have nowbeen cleaned to required identification standards, that is, tothe point where the legend and significant features are readable.Conservator Julia Tubman carried out the bulk of this work on thec.17,500 coins contained within the hoard.

Additional work has been carried out on a small number ofthese coins and conservation has also been carried out on c.400coins that were initial finds from the outer edges of the hoard,before the hoard proper was unearthed. This last group of coinswere in particularly poor condition and most required substantialchemical and manual cleaning. These coins were held in numberedpaper envelopes, some of which corresponded to small find numbersallocated when the hoard was excavated.

The soil block that held the hoard has now been dismantled andreturned to the archaeologists who carried out the initialexcavation for final sifting and checking for palaeoenvironmentalremains: that is, material that might provide further contextualinformation about the coin hoard.

At the time of Julia's last post, she reported that one of thecoin clusters (bag 4), had been scanned. As with the other coinsin the hoard, the clustered corroded coins retained the positionsthat they would have held in the bag in which they had beendeposited. In this instance the bag shape was particularly wellpreserved. The initial scan was carried out at the British Museumby Martin Cooper of the Conservation Technologies Unit, NationalMuseums Liverpool (NML).

The scan data was used to create a 3D computer model, whichwas then 3D printed to make a replica of the coin bag usingSelective Laser Sintering (SLS), a process that uses a laser tofuse particles of plastic or other material into the requiredthree-dimensional form. A plaster cast was then made from theprint and this was painted to resemble the original coin cluster,by conservators at NML.

The replica has proved very popular among visitors to theRoman Baths and was shown at a Beau Street Hoard communityconsultation event run by staff at the Roman Baths earlier in2013. Members of Bath Ethnic Minority Senior Citizens Association(BEMSCA) were among those who handled the replica. As athree-dimensional record of the original form of the coin bag,which of course no longer exists now that the coins have beenconserved, the replica is an excellent supplement to theinformation gathered about the hoard, an invaluable means ofallowing people to gain some sense of the physicality of (atleast part) of the hoard.

To read the complete article, see: The Beau Street Hoard: Not quite the end... conservation, outreachand further investigations(blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/04/08/the-beau-street-hoard-not-quite-the-end-conservation-outreach-and-further-investigations/)