Two thousand year old Roman Minerva carnelian ring
When I arrived in Belgium I found that my reputation as a successful metal detectorist had proceeded me. One of the guys who worked for me in the the Munitions Loading section, Rich Evans, told me about an archaeological dig that had been going on in the field across from his house for the previous two summers. He lived in the community of Wijshagen which is near Meeuwen. He told me that he had an old metal detector but that it wasn’t very good. He had talked with the archaeologists at the site and they told him they were finished and the city was going to plant pine trees on the site. The archaeologists had not used detectors so Rich asked them if it would be OK for him to scan the site with his detector when they were finished to see if he could find anything they might have missed. They told him it would be OK. The law in Belgium at that time (it has change since then!!!) was that you could use metal detectors on “public land” and you could keep whatever you found.
Rich “bugged” me for several weeks to bring my detector to the site. I was getting settled so I kept putting him off. Finally, I agreed to go out on a Saturday afternoon. Rich and several other young guys who worked in the Munitions Maintenance section were with me. The area was very flat and sandy. The archaeologists had cleared off all the underbrush and the top few inches of soil. We went to the center of the area they had excavated. I started sweeping my detector and almost immediately began to find things. I found three large Roman coins and four smaller ones in about an hour. The large coins, the size is called “sestertius,” were from the Emperors Vespsaian, July 1, 69 AD – June 24, 79 AD; Titus, June 24, 79 AD – September 13, 81 AD; and Trajan, January 28, 98 AD – August 7, 117 AD. I don’t remember who was depicted on the smaller coins. I was able to find so many coins so quickly because the Belgian archaeologists had only used wire screens to check the dirt. Also, they dug trenches and didn’t check all the dirt in the site.
At some time during this first expedition I got a signal and found a lump of rusted metal almost on the surface of the ground. It looked like a piece of old rusty iron pipe so I just put it into the “junk” pocket of my detecting apron. One of the young guys with me asked if he could look more closely at it so I pulled it out and handed it to him. After a few seconds he said that it looked as if there was some kind of red stone in the middle of the rusty blob. I took it back from him and looked at it myself. Indeed, I could see something buried under the rust. I took the hunting knife I was using to dig in the sand and scraped across the top of the circle of rusty iron. Immediately a chunk of rust fell off exposing a beautifully carved red stone (see photo). At once I knew that I had found an ancient Roman ring. I later turned the ring and the coins over to the National Museum of Belgium in Brussels. After they catalogued the ring and the coins they returned them to me. They told me the ring was a Roman ring from about the time of Christ, plus or minus 100 years. They said the stone was a carnelian (a semi-precious gemstone) and the figure on the ring was the Roman goddess Minerva (the romanized Greek goddess Athena). They said that the carving style was called “intaglio” which means that the image was cut down into the stone instead of being carved in relief (above the surface of the stone). They thought that it must have been carved in Rome by a master jeweler because of the fine detail. They couldn’t figure out why such a high quality stone would have been mounted in an iron ring instead of bronze, silver, or gold.
After the museum returned the ring to me (they had preserved the original iron ring, even though the bottom had broken off), I took the stone and the original ring to a master jeweler in The Netherlands. I asked him to make an 18 kt. gold ring as close to the original as he could. As you can see from the photo, he did a masterful job.
The archaeologists in Brussels believe this site was a rest stop along an old Roman road. They have not found any proof that there was a Roman village nearby and it probably wasn’t a military encampment as they have found no weapons at the site. Also, they think there might have been a temple here for travelers to worship. If there was a temple it would have been a wooden structure because they have not found any stone buildings. They base their theory about this being a rest stop and temple site because of the large number of coins and either whole or broken pieces of jewelry found in the ground. Such items would have been given as offerings to the god or gods worshiped at this place. On subsequent metal detecting visits I found many more Roman coins as well as some pieces of jewelry. The coins found here date the Roman use of the site to the late first century and early second century A.D.
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