About
This index contains all the British Celtic Coin Index records from 1961 to 2001. This means you have access to over 28,000 records and images of British Celtic coins, a remarkable resource for study. For more information on the history of this project, see the history section of the FAQ page.
It is easy to see the enormous growth in information about Celtic coin finds in Britain when you realize that there were only 12,000 records in the Celtic Coin Index at Oxford in 1991 , which represents the records of thirty years. In the following ten years, 20,000 new records were added, so that currently there are more than 32,000 records in the Index.
The original Celtic Coin Index at Oxford is organized by Celtic Coin Index number, a unique identification number indicating the year and order in which each specimen was catalogued. When Hooker & Perron built the Celtic Coin Index Online, they wanted the records to be easier to find, so they organized them within their own context. The coin records (within the broad divisions of British and Continental Celtic), are sorted Geographically by Region, then by Tribe within each region, then, in the British issues, by Van Arsdell numbers, which shows summaries of each coin, leading to individual detailed coin records. You can navigate through the records by tribe and type, or go to the search page, and look for any information of interest to you.
For geographical regions, Hooker & Perron divided the territory to allow for the most logical relationships between tribes. The regions used in the Celtic Coin Index Online take a little from various author's divisions, following Van Arsdell's divisions of North and South of the Thames, Haselgrove's South-West and West divisions, and Seaby's category of Eastern England.
There are essentially two methods of accessing the information:
- by Region/Tribe, then Van Arsdell number, down to individual coin records -- done by using the button found on all pages, or by:
- using search terms that will collect all relevant records for your search criteria.
Detailed instructions in using this site are given on a separate page, Navigating the Celtic Coin Index. If you are wondering how to use the Celtic Coin Index Online in your research, see Using the Celtic Coin Index. If you find some unfamiliar abbreviations in the text fields, see the page containing a list of Abbreviations and their meanings.
The records for the Contintental (Gaulish) tribes are not yet online, as they need to be organized differently, according to the predominant studies for each region.