Roman Coin Find in Switzerland

A find of ancient Roman coins, Roman nails, a broach, plaque fragment, and rock crystals in a remote area of Switzerland has archeologists wondering why the find would be deposited in such an unusual place.

The initial discovery took place via a hiker in 2020, with a team from the Education and Culture Directorate of the Canton of Bern conducting excavations beginning in 2022. At the time this article was being written 100 coins, 59 Roman nails used on shoes, a broach, fragment of a leaf-shaped votive plaque, and 27 rock crystals experts say are related to the find had been recovered from the site.

Regula Gubler is the site project manager. Gubler was quoted in the March 10 issue of Newsweek magazine as saying, “We do find single Roman coins occasionally in the Alps, but this site is unusual because of the amount of coins and the location,” continuing, “More common would be finds—coins, broaches—on mountain passes. This site, however, is far from human habitation, today and in Roman times, at 2,590 meters above sea level [nearly 8,500 feet], and definitely not a pass.”

Gubler speculated, “We are only at the beginning of the investigations, but we think it is a holy place, where people went to deposit votive offerings—mainly coins, but also other objects—asking the deities for things or thanking them.”

There have been significant finds of Roman coins in Switzerland in the past. In 2015 4,166 silver and bronze Roman coins were found in what today is a cherry orchard in Ueken in the canton of Aargau.

In 2022 1,290 coins primarily dating from the time of Constantine I (306-337 A.D.) were found in a nine-inch-tall clay pot in Basel-Landschaft (also known as Baselland) near what once had been three Roman estates.

The find now being excavated by Gubler’s team is situated on a plateau between the mountain peaks of Ammertenhorn and Wildstrubel, about 12 miles from Thun. Thun’s name is derived from the Celtic term dunum, meaning fortified town. Thun was seized by Rome in 58 B.C. and abandoned by the Romans about 401 A.D., the year Roman military commander Flavius Stilicho, himself a Vandal, withdrew all troops from the Rhine and Danube region..

Due to the remoteness of the area for a Roman soldier to be posted to this region was regarded as a punishment. Rome maintained small military units for securing the roads to the Northern and Western provinces of the empire and for the most important mountain passes.

Gubler told Newsweek, “Our coin specialist says the range of the assemblage of coins is not a lost wallet or someone’s treasure, it fits much better with coins deposited in temples over a longer period of time.” A full description of the coins was not immediately available, but Gubler indicated the coins ranged from the first to the fifth century.

Contemporary writers called the local inhabitants Raetians, a reference to their tribal goddess Raetia, Reita, or Reeta. A central shrine to this goddess was at Este in the Po River valley in northern Italy. Due to phonetics the name of the tribal goddess Raetia or Reisa was changed to Risa, Madrisa/Matreia, or to Mother Risa.

Raetia was the protectress of the Alpine pastures. Food rather than animals or people were sacrificed to her. Her cult dominated to the extent she almost took on a monotheistic presence. She is still revered today under the guise of female saints including Nossa Dunna delle Glisch—Our Lady of the Glaciers.

The area from the Po Estuary to Lake Constance was established as Provincia Raetia following the conquest of the Alpine tribes by Drusus and Tiberius. There is archaeological evidence of perhaps 20 Roman villages and hundreds of villas built in the western and central Swiss plateau during the first to the third century. In time the local Celtic polytheistic religion was synchronized with the Roman pagan religion. Celtic deities were then worshipped under the names of their Roman counterparts.