The day that changed Joseph Severn's life began last June as an ordinary workday. Severn is on a team of archaeologists digging at a site in the City of London, the oldest part of London, England. The area, once called Londinium, was part of the Roman Empire until the 5th century.
As Severn gently cleaned a spot where he had removed the remains of a floor, he caught a flash of gold. There in the dirt lay a pile of coins-43 in all.
"They were tightly together, so they must have been in a textile or leather bag," Severn, 28, told TFK last week. The bag had decayed long ago. He knew right away that the coins were Roman. The head of a Roman Emperor or Empress from the 1st or 2nd century appeared on each one.
That much gold was about four years' salary for a Roman soldier. The coins must have been someone's life savings. Today they are priceless. They went on display at the Museum of London earlier this month.
Severn, who works for the museum's archaeological service, says the bag of coins was probably put inside a box beneath the floor of a home. Why no one recovered the riches for 1,800 years remains a mystery.
The dig is turning up other surprises. Last week the team found a 3rd century mosaic just a mile from where the coins were found.
"We look for things that tell what life was like," Severn says. "Walls, roads-those are archaeologically exciting."
Severn decided to become an archaeologist as a boy, when his father told him "heavily embellished" tales of buried treasure. But Severn never imagined he would dig up such a treasure himself. "This is the find of a lifetime," he says.