This would make me dig up my back yard

Front yard, the neighbor's yard, the street....About 50,000 silver and bronze coins uncovered by men who spent decades exploring one field

Maybe we should all buy farmland in Britain

Not to grow stuff... to dig up!

For 1,800 years the story of the 'lost British emperor' who defied ancient Rome has been merely a footnote in history books.

Carausius's audacious seizure of power and seven-year reign over Britain and much of Gaul have largely been forgotten.

But thanks to the astonishing discovery of 52,000 Roman coins, new light is being shed on one of the most turbulent periods of our island story.

Hundreds of the coins - buried in a gigantic clay jar and weighing as much as two men - bear the image of Carausius.

The discovery was made by hospital chef Dave Crisp using a metal detector.

The 63-year-old unearthed 21 of the coins on a farm near Frome in Somerset before realising the find was so significant expert help was needed. He called in archaeologists who set about the delicate task of excavating the site.

All I've ever dug up are turkey bones...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- A hobbyist with a metal detector struck both gold and silver when he uncovered an important cache of ancient Celtic coins in a cornfield in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht.

''It's exciting, like a little boy's dream,'' Paul Curfs, 47, said Thursday after the spectacular find was made public.

Archaeologists say the trove of 39 gold and 70 silver coins was minted in the middle of the first century B.C. as the future Roman ruler Julius Caesar led a campaign against Celtic tribes in the area.

The freakout over the new Canadian coin

By one of our intelligence agencies exposes more than their doofus clown suits and red noses. The fear that the odd little flower was a new nano-tech device indicates extreme envy as well. (Why the hell hasn't the CIA thought of that?!! Bugging the money!)



Chester at Vanity Press has more:

WASHINGTON -- An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defense Department's false espionage warning earlier this year, The Associated Press has learned.

The odd-looking -- but harmless -- "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance - inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

We gotta keep an eye on those sneaky Canadians. They must hate us for our freedoms....