Academic researchers and those involved in finds identification will be pleased to learn that the Celtic Coin Index (CCI) – the world’s largest dataset of Iron Age coins in Britain – is now available as an online resource via the Celtic Coin Index Digital (CCID).
Iron Age coins circulated in Britain from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century AD, predominantly in the southern and eastern parts of England. Many feature intriguing designs and inscriptions, making them important sources of information for understanding society, trade, and culture in the pre-Roman period.
The most significant collection of information about these items is the CCI, which now contains nearly 85,000 records relating to c.68,000 specimens. Founded as an extensive archive of index cards by Derek Allen and Sheppard Frere at University College London in 1961, the collection moved to the University of Oxford in 1964, and since then it has been accessible in person at the university’s Institute of Archaeology, and in various online forms.
The CCID is more technologically advanced than its predecessors, though. Created by a team of researchers working at the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum, and the American Numismatic Society (ANS), the new e-resource features digitised versions of all physical CCI record cards and some of their related images and data. Crucially, this has all been published online using cutting-edge open-source software derived from the Numishare platform (created by Ethan Gruber of the ANS), which means the CCID is fully searchable and capable of handling complex queries. This new online collection, moreover, has been linked with other coin databases around the globe, via a sister website, Iron Age Coins in Britain (IACB; https://iacb.arch.ox.ac.uk), which uses stable numismatic identifiers and linked open-data methodologies established by the Nomisma.org project to allow information from various collections to be gathered, explored, and visualised all in one place.
The CCID, which was built with financial support from the Royal Numismatic Society, the British Numismatic Society, and the University of Oxford’s Barclay Head Fund, as well as a number of private donors, can be found at: https://cci.arch.ox.ac.uk.
