The day after I found the Roman ring and the coins I returned to the old Roman site with 2 Lt. Bob DiBella. Bob was my loading officer and had just arrived at Kliene Brogel with his young wife. They were staying in the same hotel as we were while they also were trying to find local housing.

Bob had never been metal detecting but he was excited about the ring and coins I showed him from the previous day’s search. He asked if he could go along to watch me search the area again. I offered to let him use my son’s metal detector. I had bought Jeff a low-cost Garrett machine when we were stationed at Ramstein Air Base. It wasn’t a toy but it wasn’t a very sophisticated machine. Since I’d found the ring and all the coins almost on the surface the day before I thought he might actually be able to find something with Jeff’s machine.

We went to the site and began searching. I went to the area where I’d found the ring and coins the day before and Bob searched about 15-20 away from me so our machines wouldn’t “chatter” at each other by being too close. I found a couple of small coins and had just picked up a loud and deep signal (more about this in my next post!!) when Bob yelled that he had found something. He came over to me and held out a dark metal object that had the face of a woman on it. I immediately recognized it as being of Roman manufacture. It was a face-on bust of an upper-class Roman woman of the first century. I recognized the style of her dress, necklace, and hair as being Roman and from that period. The item seemed to be a kind of broach that could be worn on a shirt or vest. It was concave on the back but it had a pin protruding from the back of it so it could be pushed through clothing and secured from behind. It was made of bronze and had a very nice and uniform brown-green patina from it’s two millennia in the ground.

Bob also turned this over to the archaeologist from the Belgium National Museum. They confirmed that it dated from the first century. They thought the details on the face of the woman seemed to look like black African. They said it was not unknown in the first century for African slaves to receive manumission and to even become “citizens” of the Roman Empire. There is no way to know who the woman was whose face was memorialized on this ancient pin but her features are still clear. The archaeologists suggested that the pin might have been given to her son or husband to wear on his travels/during his military service, to remind him of his mother or wife. The museum returned the pin to Bob at the same time they returned the ring and coins that I had found. Bob kept the pin until right before he was transferred from Kleine Brogel. Surprisingly, he handed the pin to me one day and told me that it probably meant more to me than to him, as he knew I had a growing collection of Roman artifacts from Germany and now Belgium. I was honored to take the pin and keep it in my collection.