ARCHEOLOGY – In Asturias, the animal in search of food unearthed more than 200 pieces from Antioch, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Rome, Arles, Lyon and even London.
He probably thought he was discovering worms or other insects while digging his hole. But it is a treasure trove of some 200 Roman-era coins that has been unearthed in northwestern Spain through the efforts of a foraging badger, archaeologists have said.
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This discovery was revealed at the end of December in The Notebooks of Prehistory and Archeology of the Autonomous University of Madrid, a periodical journal published by the University of Madrid. The Spanish press then echoed it, a year after the terrible Filomena snowstorm which had paralyzed a large part of the country for ten days at the beginning of January 2021 and disrupted the ecosystem for a time, forcing certain animals to venture further from their den to find food.
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According to the article published by the archaeologists in this journal, it is in the cave of the Cuesta de Bercio, in Grado, in the region of Asturias, “that the coins were found in the sand probably stirred up by a badger, at the foot of its burrow“. A local resident saw them and alerted the authorities. A group of researchers and archaeologists then made the trip in April to unearth the loot.
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“This is a set of 209 pieces dating from the 3rd to 5th century AD“, from “mainly from the north and eastern Mediterranean», from Antioch, Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Rome, Arles, Lyon but also London, details the article. The researchers, who believe that it isof an exceptional discovery“, suggest that these coins could have been deposited there, because “a context of political instability» in particular linked to the invasion of the Suevi, a Germanic people, in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula.
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