Viking unhacked silver hoard found in Sweden

Sweden sees Norway’s Viking hack silver hoard and raises with a Viking hoard of silver jewelry and coins in pristine unhacked condition. The hoard was discovered in an excavation of the Viking settlement of Täby, outside Stockholm. It was cached under the wooden floor of one of the Viking Age (800-1050 A.D.) houses about 1,000 years ago.

 

The hoard consists of eight torc-style braided neck rings in exceptionally good condition, two arm rings, one finger ring, two beads and 12 coins perforated for use as pendants, 11 of them mounted with hanging loops. The coins had been placed in a linen pouch which was then added to the jewelry in a small ceramic pot. Fragments of the linen pouch have survived, giving archaeologists a rare opportunity to study an organic material.

“When I started to carefully remove the neck rings one by one, I had this extraordinary feeling of “they just keep coming and coming”. In total there were eight high quality torque-style neck rings, extraordinary well preserved despite having been made and deposited almost a thousand years ago. They looked almost completely new,” [archaeologist] Maria Lingström says. […]

The coins are a perfect example of the far-reaching connections and blossoming trade, which flourished in Viking Age Scandinavia. Several coins are of European origin, representing countries as England, Bohemia and Bavaria. In addition, the treasure consisted of five Arabic coins, so called dirhams. One of the European coins is extremely rare and was minted in the city of Rouen, in Normandy, France. It dates to approximately the 10th Century AD. According to Professor Jens Christian Moesgaard at Stockholm University, this type of coin has previously ever been identified from drawings in an 18th century book.

Here is a very cool video of the first neck ring being carefully loosened and removed from the ground. It’s rare to see these moments of an archaeological dig filmed and shared, for some inexplicable reason, even though it’s total popcorn material.