Wiley,
Looking at the image of the
hoard it appears that most coins might have a very very tricky
patina on them - ie a soft powdery patins under a fairly hard soil. If this assumption is indeed correct then it will make any cleaning very difficult.
Even though it increases your
work load I would strongly advise you to get something with separate trays - even just some
cheap plastic screw holders or
part holders that you can buy at a hardware store or dollar store.
Then place each coin in a separate compartment and add a number tag in the compartment. As there is obviously no longer any internal stratigraphic evidence - ie which coin was at top of container and which was at bottom (if indeed they were found in a container) - you can simply put each coin into its compartment in whatever order you wish.
Then photograph both sides of each coin now,
as is, pre-cleaning, to document what is there. Though you might not see much detail yet that will at least preserve some image in case some coins have patinas the crumble away completely.
I would also note
weight and
diameter of each example at this stage and anything you can already tell through the dirt - ie what class of
anonymous follis.
Then you will have to make a call based on how powdery the
patina of each coin is.
Worst case, if the
patina is very powdery even soaking in DW can cause damage as the
patina can disolve away and then the when the dirt
comes off there is absolutely no detail left underneath. Frankly, in these cases your only real
choice is to perhaps wax the coin
as is (ie pre- DW soak) to try to stabilize it and see how well you can attribute it then.
If the
patina is somewhat more stable then you next challenge will be to soften the dirt. Here you have DW, baking soda and
Gringotts mixes (in roughly increasing order). I would try to re-photograph or at least re-examine each coin the first time you wet it in case you lose more detail with further soaks.
With these potentially crappy patinas you might be faced with the fact that whatever you do the patinas will be effectively stripped. Frankly, if the
patina is in such a
poor condition anyway that would be sad but inevitable and if the results revealed some interesting
hoard data then it would be well worth it.
As you probably know, these
anonymous folles can be very worn - they circulated for a long time in some parts of the Balkans and the East. Some were also poorly struck with limited detail to begin with. Overall the one you cleaned has
average or less wear but does appear to have suffered from corrosion which gives it that grainy-ness and thus blurs the details somewhat. Unless I am wrong and the
patina is much more stable than it looks in the photo you might be lucky to get them all to look like the one you have cleaned.
Good luck. I await comments from others and to hear more on your progress.
Hopefully you will be able to share details with us of the breakdown of types/classes,
weight, diamater, die position, etc.
Shawn
