ANTHROPOLOGIST SEEKS ORIGIN OF REMOTE AUSTRALIAN COIN HOARD

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V16 2013 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 16, Number 10, March 10, 2013, Article 30

Here's an article about an anthropologist on a quest to uncover the origins of a group of coins found in a remote part of Australia. -Editor

Like a detective working a cold case, an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis anthropologist hopes to unravel the mystery of how a handful of coins, some dating back more than 1,000 years, wound up on a remote beach along Australia’s northern coastline.

Armed with a grant from the Australian Geographic Society, Ian McIntosh will lead an expedition in July to the long-abandoned Wessel Islands where the coins were found.

The ancient copper coins have little monetary value, but in archaeological terms they are priceless, McIntosh said. The coins may even touch upon the arrival of Europeans in Australia, as British explorer James Cook is credited with being the first European to have encountered the country’s eastern coastline in 1770. The coins raise the possibility of shipwrecks that may have occurred along an early maritime trading route and bring to mind the ancient trading network that linked East Africa, Arabia, India and the Spice Islands over 1,000 years ago.

Aboriginal folklore also speaks of a hidden cave near where the coins were found that is filled with doubloons and weaponry of an ancient era, McIntosh said. In any case, McIntosh begins his quest for answers with a nearly 70-year-old map where X marks the spot but few other clues about the coins that now reside in a box in the back of a museum in Sydney, because people don’t know what to make of them, he said.

The coins were found in 1944. Maurie Isenberg, an Australian soldier assigned to a forward radar station at Jensen Bay on the Wessel Islands, spotted several coins in the sand while fishing in his spare time one day. Having little interest in coins at the time, he placed them in an airtight tin, where they remained until 1979, when he sent the coins off to have them identified.

Shortly after finding the coins, Isenberg drew an X on a map of the area that had been drawn by another soldier. McIntosh now possesses that map.

Four of the coins were identified as Dutch East India Company coins, with one dating back to 1690. The other five coins, dating from the 900s to 1300s, were African coins from the once flourishing Kilwa Sultanate, now a World Heritage ruin south of Zanzibar in Tanzania. The copper coins, the first to be produced in sub-Saharan Africa, were never in use beyond the immediate locality of East Africa, and only one has ever been found elsewhere, in Oman.

How and why do five Kilwa coins find their way to the Australian Outback? McIntosh said he believes an archaeological site survey, which has never been done, and an excavation will begin to answer those questions.