Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article deals with the history and current state of research on the hoard of Roman imperial denarii accidentally discovered in 1975 near the village of Slovita (Lviv region). The deposit was discovered during the road's expansion on the village’s southeastern outskirts. The first brief report on the hoard, made in the newspaper «Trud», contained several mistake statements. Archival sources, including the unpublished History of the Village of Slovita by local history teacher Maria Zanik, revealed that the real discoverer of the deposit was not Yaroslav Kindrat (as previously thought) but a resident of the neighbouring village of Yaktoriv, Mykhailo Kunytsia. It was also established that local shepherd children were among the first to come across the find, and the police later seized the coins. Maria Zanik herself, along with her students, found three more coins at the site. The entire hoard of 270 coins was transferred to the local museum in Slovita, not to the Zolochiv museum, as Vladislav Kropotkin had mistakenly stated. However, in 1981, the museum was temporarily closed, and when it was reopened in 1992, the coin hoard was no longer in its exposition. The article also presents the latest discovery of a denarius that was part of it. It was accidentally found in 2019: a denarius of the Titus minted in 80 AD in Rome (RIC II.12 Titus 122). This find indirectly confirms the location of the deposit and its very early chronological structure. This hoard could have been deposited by the population from one of the nearby sites of the Early Roman or Late Roman period (Lipica, Pszeworsk or Chernyakhiv cultures). The hoard was located in the thick of the Roman denarius hoards area, i.e., in a region where the barbarian population had a long and active tradition of using and depositing Roman coins. Typologically, the closest to the hoard from Slovita may be the deposit from the village of Khidnovychi in the Lviv region.
Authors: Nazar Demskyi, Kyrylo Myzgin
Institution: University of Warsaw
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4405943402