Coins and Cosmologies in Iron Age Western Britain

Abstract

This paper offers a material culture-based approach to British Western Iron Age coins (i.e. those often attributed to the Dobunni). Through analysis of the materiality and imagery of these objects, the author explores the embodiment of later Iron Age cosmologies. In doing so, the cycles of day and night and of life and death are discussed. The ways in which these cosmologies could have been transposed onto the landscape through coin production and depositional contexts helps to demonstrate how Iron Age societies in Western Britain may have understood their world and confirmed their space within it.