A team digging into a basalt outcrop on the plateau of Corent, southwest of Clermont-Ferrand, has uncovered what its director calls the largest known coin-striking complex from the entire ancient world, Gallic Europe included. Matthieu Poux, an archaeology professor at Lyon II University who has worked the site for 25 years, led the summer 2026 campaign that exposed the stone building. He has described a workshop where the Arverni people appear to have struck gold and silver coins in the decades before Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.
A stone building twice the size of the 2024 workshop
Poux’s crew, roughly a hundred students and volunteers who worked through both heat waves and drenching summer rain, cleared about 500 square meters of a structure with walls one to two meters thick and at least 40 meters long, cut through by a narrow passage and lined with a row of small cells fitted with hearths or ovens and supplied with running water. The building extends a bronze-coin workshop the same team found in 2024, which struck small coins stamped with a fox, a symbol tied to the Arverni king Luern.
Where the 2024 structure had a timber frame typical of Gallic construction, the new building is built in stone, in a style that recalls Mediterranean architecture rather than anything native to the region, according to the excavation account published by Breizh-Info. Unlike the earlier dig, where failed casts and unfinished strings of coin blanks turned up throughout, this year’s excavation produced almost no metal waste at all, just a handful of gold and silver flecks stuck to small anvils, chisels and hammers. Poux told the French radio network RCF that excavating a mint inside a Gallic town center is “a first at the European scale.”
A lead test disc ties the site to gold and silver staters
The clearest evidence for precious-metal coining is a lead disc stamped with two dies matching a well-documented Arverni gold stater design known as the “charioteer and quadripartite wheels” type. Under magnification, the disc shows the outline of a horse’s back, a rider and the start of a chariot wheel on one face, with a stylized curly-haired head representing the issuing authority on the other. Numismatist Katherine Gruel, a CNRS research director based at the École Normale Supérieure who took part in the dig, said the disc was used to test the strike and let a commissioning official approve the design before full production began, and that only one other Gallic example of this kind of trial disc is known, found in Grenoble.
Whoever ran the workshop later defaced the disc’s punches with a chisel, an anti-counterfeiting step meant to stop anyone from using it to cast fraudulent copies of the design. Other tools recovered from the cells, including a small bronze punch bearing a stylized face and polished stones worn down in a pattern consistent with trimming finished coins to a uniform weight, point to a highly disciplined operation. Poux has suggested the control was strict enough that workers may have had their pockets checked at the end of each shift.
A production chain running from raw ore to finished coin
Numerous flint stones turned up across the site as well, a detail that matters because flint mixed with salt can separate gold from silver in electrum, the naturally occurring alloy of the two metals. Their presence suggests the Corent workshop may have controlled the entire production chain, from raw ore through refining, minting and the final weight check, rather than simply finishing coin blanks brought in from elsewhere. That would put a single Gallic site in charge of a process ancient sources rarely describe in this much physical detail, decades before any Roman administration touched the region.
Corent’s case for being the Arverni capital, not Gergovie
The discovery lands inside a long-running argument among French archaeologists over which of three fortified hilltop sites, Corent, Gergovie or Gondole, actually served as the Arverni capital before the Roman conquest. Poux has argued for years that Corent, with its large sanctuary, artisan quarter, public square and assembly hemicycle spread across more than 50 hectares, was the true seat of Arverni power, not Gergovie, seven kilometers away, where Vercingetorix inflicted a defeat on Caesar in 52 BC just months before the final loss at Alesia. The Puy-de-Dôme département, which has owned and excavated the site since 2001, already pointed to the 2024 bronze-coin workshop as evidence that Corent was “the city where money was struck,” a status marker for a Gallic capital. One reading of that campaign holds that Vercingetorix deliberately emptied his own capital to mass his forces at Gergovie, so the Romans could not seize its wealth the way they had at Bourges. Finding a precious-metal mint at Corent would reinforce that theory considerably. Once Rome won, both oppida faded as the new regional capital of Augustonemetum, which became modern Clermont-Ferrand, took their place.
The site has since been covered over to protect it from looters until the next digging season, and Poux’s team is now seeking between 50,000 and 60,000 euros to properly analyze this summer’s finds, plus a similar amount to keep excavating a separate section of the plateau in 2027, on top of existing funding from the French state and the Puy-de-Dôme department, which owns the archaeological park and keeps it open to the public free of charge.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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