Two treasures containing a total of nearly 300 thousand-year-old silver coins, including Arab and Germanic ones, have been discovered near the remains of a Viking fortress in northwestern Denmark, the museum which will house them said on Thursday.
It was a young girl who discovered the treasures, a few meters apart, in a cornfield last fall, while wandering around with a metal detector as part of an expedition. of group excavation. “A treasure like this is very rare,” director of the North Jutland Museum, Lars Christian Nørbach, told AFP.
The silver coins were found about eight kilometers from the ring fort of Fyrkat near the town of Hobro. They would date from the 980s, according to their inscriptions. In addition to Danish coins, Arab and Germanic coins as well as bits of a 500 gram jewel from Scotland or Ireland, according to archaeologists, are also part of the loot.
“The surprise is that the treasure dates from the same period as this Viking fortress, built by King Harald Blue Tooth, who is the founder of Denmark, in a way,” enthuses Lars Christian Nørbach, for which the discovery will allow to know more about the history of the Vikings. According to him, there could be a link between these treasures (which the Vikings buried during the wars) and the fortress, which burned down during the same period. Danish coins were minted in very limited quantities by King Harald, he explained.
Private archaeological initiatives are legal in Denmark provided they have the agreement of the landowner and return the finds to the museums. Archaeologists have announced that excavations will continue next fall, once the harvest period is over. Their hope is to find the graves and more likely the homes of the former owners of this loot.
The Vikings believed that burying their jewels enabled them to find them after death. The general public will be able to observe these finds this summer at the Aalborg Historical Museum where they will be exhibited from 1 July. The young girl at the origin of the discovery should receive financial compensation, of an undisclosed amount.