INTRODUCTION

Central to this chapter are gold staters of the Scheers 31 type, with a triskeles or whorl on the obverse and a horse facing left on the reverse. This coinage is interesting for several reasons:

• 1. It represents the most northerly Late La Tène gold emission on the European continent. Pre-Roman coin circulation was a peripheral phenomenon in the Lower Rhine region, which raises the question as to what factors determined the slow acceptance of coins in this area.

• 2. The relatively late date and limited distribution of the coinage offers various possibilities for historical interpretation. Several scholars have ascribed it to the Eburones and proposed a direct link with the Eburonean revolt against Caesar in 54/53 BC. However, the question is whether this interpretation remains plausible following the recent revision of the chronological framework for Late Iron Age coinage in Belgic Gaul.

• 3. It may tell us about the politico-geographical situation in the Lower Rhine region, and the Rhine/ Meuse delta in particular, at the time of Caesar's conquest – that is, prior to the ethnogenesis of the Batavians. A gold coin emission is direct evidence of a political authority which used the coins to consolidate and enforce its power networks.

• 4. The use of metal detectors has led to an upsurge in single coin finds of the Scheers 31 type in the past decade, with a two-fold increase in the number of sites and a three-fold increase in the number of coins. As a result, we are now better informed about the metrology, distribution and archaeological contexts of the coins. The latter enables us to focus on the depositional processes by which the coins ended up in the soil.

Using the new data, I will attempt to sketch the production, circulation and deposition of the gold triskeles coins and to answer the questions raised.

LATE IRON AGE COIN CIRCULATION IN THE LOWER RHINE REGION

In the Late Iron Age, the Lower Rhine region north of Bonn represented the northern periphery of the coin-using communities. Originally, pre-Roman coin circulation was a marginal phenomenon in this region.