British Numismatic Society

When a user is only interested in a part of Britain and Ireland they may wish to place a polygon around their AOI (area of interest) in order to not show unnecessary hoards on the map. This means that when downloading a hoard report it is not unnecessarily long through being cluttered with unneeded hoards. 

Users may add more than one polygon - for example three polygons could be added if one was interested in the Viking hoards around York, the Isle of Man and Dublin.  It is easy to change the shape of polygons and delete  one or more polygons.  The best way to become familiar with the polygon functionality is simpy to experiment.

Once a user has set up polygons and hoard filters as required they may wish to save the settings, using the icon as shown below:

Some hoards may have been buried in haste ahead of an impending battle, and it can thus be useful to know battlefield locations.  When a user switches on the battlefield display option then the battlefields shown on the map will be controlled by the hoard deposition date slider, for example if hoard deposition dates of 1000-1100 AD are selected then only battles fought within those dates will have their location shown.  This feature is of most use when the selected date range is quite limited.  If no hoard deposition range is selected then all battlefields will be plotted on the map.

The location of many battlefields is uncertain - those locations that are reasonably well known are shown in a darker symbol.

For an example of the use of the battlefields feature zoom in on the area of the 1485 Battle of Bosworth, east of Birmingham, and look atthe Sutton Cheney hoards.

Work on adding more battlefields continues...

Hoard Record Quality (HRQ factor)

MCHBI contains a spectrum of different quality records. On the one hand we have hoards that were found in recent years that have been fully documented on the basis of current numismatic knowledge, and the coins have been preserved in a museum. On the other hand are reports of hoards found hundreds of years ago, vaguely documented and with little knowledge of the type and number of coins, and the whereabouts of the coins unknown.

A numismatist using MCHBI for their research may wish to have a quick and easy way to filter out unreliable hoard records. This is being implemented and the way it works is that nine different input parameters are automatically assessed, and a total record quality score (0-100) calculated for each hoard. 

Another slider bar is being added MCHBI main menu such that poorer documented hoards can easily be filtered out.  Also, a new option will be available to colour code hoard icons by their record quality score. Note that whenever a hoard record is updated its data quality score is automatically recalculated.  

With the current scheme the record set (1,929 hoards) appears as shown below. Hoard Record Quality ("HRQ") score is along the horizontal axis, and the number of hoards is shown on the vertical axis.  To better understand the distribution, it is instructive to break out the hoard record qualty scores by region:

We see that English and Welsh records are spread across the score spectrum, and the Scottish records to a certain extent though they do feature far more prominently in the lower half of the spectrum. It is the Irish and Isle of Man records though which are heavily concentrated in the lower half of the spectrum.  This is unsurprising for the following reasons:

1. It is only England and Wales which have the excellent PAS records
2. Ireland has no equivalent to the PAS; and hoards which do get published appear with varying degrees of detail. The lack of a PAS type system probably means that many modern-day discoveries go unreported.
3. The Scottish system falls between that of England/Wales and Ireland – there is a formal process but details of discovered hoards are sporadically published. The Minutes and annual reports of the Treasure Trove Unit are rather limited in the details that they supply.

It is anticipated that many MCHBI users will not apply any filtering to their datasets, but those that do wish to filter out the more unreliable records will set their low-cut filter in the 15-20 range, or lower.

One of the options is to colour the hoard icons shown on the map by a colour code which denotes how accurately the hoard location is shown. The colour scale being: 

The location of hoards found many years ago is often described in the literature, resulting in many older hoards being denoted with green or yellow icons, however, nowadays, given the sensitivity around illegal metal detecting ("nighthhawkers"), the precise location is often not available, and such hoards are often shown with orange markers.

In a very few cases, where a hoard site is particularly sensitive, the true location has been disguised, and the user will not be able to tell which these hoards are from the colour of the icon.

Where hoard locations are very vague, they are denoted with a red icon.

Any users who know the actual location of a mis-plotted hoard are invited to contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

When the map is zoomed out you will at first see more hoard clusters than hoards. Individual hoards are shown with a location icon (default colur is green).

You may zoom in to an area of interest: the zoom buttons are at top left and the map can be dragged around the screen with your mouse.  As you increasingly zoom in the clusters will separate out into their individual hoards.  

Going to the main menu (tab at the bottom of the screen) will allow a user to access the Settings tab - in there you have the option to switch off clustering (not recommended when you are zoomed out), and also a user may switch on the display of hoard names.

If a user has zoomed in the desired zoom level, and displayed hoards with their names, they may then wish to click on any hoard icon. Normally a single mouse click in the centre of the icon will bring up a small summary panel such as this example...

If the user wishes to see the detail for this hoard then they may click on the blue hyperlink, and the hoard report will pop up, as per this example for Dorking...

The report for an individual hoard opens in a new browswer tab, you may leave this open or close it, but to return to the map simply select the original browser tab.

The underlying concept behind this project is not to give a full description of each hoard, but just some summary details to allow a user to see if the hoard is one that they may wish to investgate further. To do this a list of references is given, with hyperlinks where the reference is readily available online.  Note that through time hoard descriptions may be updated and additional references added.

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