Metal detectors have had a banner year in Scandinavia, where records for the largest recovered Viking silver hoards have been made in Norway, Denmark, and now Finland.
A man found two large hoards of silver in southern Finland, containing thousands of coins, as well as pieces of jewelry and scrap silver, that together weighed around 10 pounds.
Though not typically associated with the deeds of the Vikings, the Finns were nonetheless deeply interconnected with the famous seafaring raiders. Found in the town of Sysmä, these two hoards could have been brought by Swedish Vikings who were known to have been active in the area as both raiders and settlers.
Kalle Lappinen was metal detecting in his hometown when his instrument beeped in the middle of a field. As soon as he dug a few inches into the soil, the detector then began to “roar.”
“With the fury of a monkey, I dug through the soil, bottom moraine and cobblestones,” he recalled to the New York Times. He found a pile of compacted coins about 18 inches down and, once he had “recovered from the adrenaline rush,” reported it to authorities.
It was only a moment later that just a stone’s throw away, his detector began to yap again, and he discovered another trove of coins, this one also containing a silver bead, bracelet, a charm, and a piece of chopped-up silver. In tandem, the hoards brought to light thousands of coins, and make up the largest discovery of its kind in Finnish history.
Dating of the objects points to the 11th century, the tail end of the Viking Age as it’s typically defined, when the Normans took control of England and the Christianization of Scandinavia had almost finished.
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This was a tumultuous time for Northern Europe, when riches accumulated by trading, raiding, or both, were often buried away. No funerary remains have been found associated with the hoards, and so it’s assumed they were interred for safekeeping, only for their owners to never return.
The Sysmä discovery is “a case of responsible and responsive detecting, which has produced a promising archaeological discovery,” Eljas Oksanen, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, tells the Times.
“[D]etectorists can produce a considerable amount of new valuable information about the past, not the least because they (as in this case) search in areas that professional archaeologists do not go to.”
The Sysmä hoard continues a truly epic trend of record-breaking discoveries. In May, GNN reported that metal detectors in Norway found the largest trove of Viking Age silver in the country’s history. Then, just last month, a Dane who was preparing his backyard for a new terrace stumbled upon just the same—the largest silver hoard ever found in Denmark.
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