S5004023

Coins and power in Lata Iron Age Britain 40

to have been taken over the colour of the early ‘gold’ coinage that this yeJlowy colour was itself a clearly defined conceptual and probably linguistic category.

It could be that MIA/LIA society ‘valucd’ not so much the number of utoms of gold in a coin, but rather the colour of the artefact and its resistance to tamishing. It looks as if this colour was maintained just as long as the serial imagery was main-tained because of the prevailing cultural aesthetic, in which a high degrce of conser-vatism existed. Coinage is not the only medium to demonstrate this. The primacy of this yellow-golden colour is also displayed by the analysis of gold-electrum torcs firom Britain. These high-status signifiers similarly follow this colour pathway in their alloy composirion. However if these two media were transferable, as the metrological links mentioned above suggest, then having similar metallurgical contents is to be ex-pected. For some reason both the Stage i coin and the torcs held to this specific colour.

Two coin senes maintained the original serial imagery right through to the Claudian annesation: the SE coin series (‘Durotriges’) and the NE coin series (‘Corieltauvi’). Yet the alloy transformations in each area were quitc different. Amongst the Durotriges the image changed by incremental stages, as already illus-trated, while the alloy changed radically. The gold content of the coins varied significandy, and may have fallen over time, but it is noticeable that the colour was maintained as long as possible, and was the last thing to be sacrificed. If ‘cost saving’ had been the name of the gamę, then dilution with copper instead of a copper/silver alloy would have taken place, but this did not happen. Colour was important. The Durotriges do not appear to have been alone, as the debasement of the coinage of Normandy and Armorica seems to have followed similar lines (Burnett and Cowell 1988). Amongst the Corieltauvi, however, whilst the old serial imagery was maintained, the alloy composirion of the gold shifted along the same lines as the other major coinages of Britain, which will be discussed later. Here, and only here, colour was sacrificed.

Ritual and production

The manufacturing process of coin is complicated, and the precision with which colour was manipulated suggests a tremendous degree of technical knowledge, let alone skilled craftsmanship. But how was this knowledge leamt and remembered?

In non-literate societies, complex procedures are necessarily ritualised - a 8equence of procedures that cannot be written down in a scientific manuał must be committed to mcmory as a formulaic -spell\ Tuming to still-extant Eurasian folk traditions ... metal-making and magic-making can easily go together as, for example, in the story of Wayland the Smith (also Volundr, Wieland) - lord of the elves and a cunning swordsmith - who is able to fly with wings he bas madę himself (although this motif is often referred back to the Daedelus myth, it is better connected to visual narratives in northem metal iconographies dcpicting shamanistic flight).

(Budd and Taylor 1995:139)

Ritual and production have gonehand in hand in ncarly all pre-industrial societies. Howcvcr the study of ritual and technology has only recently begun to be discussed in Iron Age Britain. A paper by Hingley (1997) has started to do this for ironworking, by looking for curiosities and structured patteming in the archaeological debris from the amelting and smithing process. Influcnced strongly by Herbert’s work on ironworking in Africa (Herbert 1993), Hingley conchided that we reąuire a new direction for the study of technology in the past, one which addresses the symbolic significance of the production of materials, including bronze, salt and pottery as well as iron - to which I would, of course, add coin.

A start can be madę by looking at the potential symbolic meaning of colour in Iron Age Britain in relation 10 gold, silver and copper alloys. As the temary dia-grams above have shown, the alloy and colour of both torcs and staters were intimately related. As stated earlier, there is evidence that torcs and coins were metrologically as well as metaliurgically related, with torcs being converted into coin and vice versa.

The arrival of these new media must have had a strong social impact: one being wom to signify authońty, the other being distributed in social payments to reinforce that authońty. If this is true, then the second century BC must have seen a remark-able transformation in the outward display and articulation of authońty; and the sudden arńval of gold, with its manifestadons in coinage, gold thread and torcs, clearly associated this yellow-gold colour with power.

Why should this yeUow-gold colour have gained so much significance? Why should it have been chosen in preference to a red-gold or white-gold? Another ethnographic example can give us some indicadon of the symbolic attńbutes people associate with colour. One of the most vivid examples comes from Central Mexico, in the millennium running up to the Spanish conąuest of 1521 (Hosler 1995). Amongst the Aztecs/Mexica in central Meńco and the Nahuad-speaking people in surrounding territories, yellow-gold and white-silver were taken to be divine metals relating to the sun and the rnoon; indeed the metals were in vańous conteats descńbed as divine excretions of the sun and the moon. The possession of artefacts displaying these divine colours granted status by supematural affiliadon.

From the world of the Aztecs, sources such as the Cantares Mexicanos (native poetry dealing with the conquest) and the Psalmodia Christiana (hymns used to try and chństianise the pagans) help us to understand how these colours related to their ‘sacred domain’. This was the 'dreamworid' of the shamanisdc visions, descńbed in terms of a shimmering garden fuli of intensecolours:

... one came into direct contact with the creadve, life-giving forces of the universe and with the umeless world of deides and ancestors. The garden is a shimmering place fillcd with divine fire; the light of the sun reflects from the petals of fiowers and the ińdescent feathers of birds , human beings - the souls of the dead or the ńtually transformed living I are themselves fiowers, birds, and shimmering gems... i (Burkhart 1992: 89)