Finding of a 6th-century treasure chest of gold jewelry by a novice treasure hunter
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Experts say the cache is one of the largest and most important of its kind ever found in Denmark. Vejlemuseum
First-time treasure hunter Ole Ginnerup Schytz had only been out with his new metal detector for a few hours when he stumbled upon an astonishing discovery: a cache of 1,500-year-old gold artifacts dating back to the Iron Age. Now, experts have deemed the find, made in a field near the southwestern Danish town of Jelling last December, one of the largest and most important in Danish history.
Schytz remembers hearing the device activate and then pushing the dirt aside to reveal a small, bent piece of metal.
“It was scratched and covered in mud,” he tells Steffen Nuepert of Danish broadcast station TV Syd, according to a translation by Sarah Cascone of Artnet News. “I had no idea, so all I could think of was that it looked like the lid of a herring tin.”
The metal detecting hobbyist had dismantled what turned out to be the first of 22 pieces of sixth-century gold jewelry. Altogether, the treasure weighed just over two pounds.
Speaking to TV Syd, quoted by The Sun’s Felix Allen, Schytz calls the find “the epitome of pure luck.”
He adds: “Denmark is [16,621 square miles], and then I had to choose to place the detector exactly where this find was.”
Close-up view of the gold artifact found in the Road / Vejlemuseerne cache conservation center
Months after Schytz’s chance discovery, The Vejlemuseerne in Jutland finally released the ancient treasures to the public.
“This is the biggest find that has been produced in the 40 years that I have been in [Denmark’s] National Museum,” archaeologist Peter Vang Petersen tells TV Syd, according to ArteT News. “We have to go back to the 16th and 18th centuries to find something similar.”
According to one statement, the haul consists mainly of bracteates, medallions that were popular in northern Europe during the migration period (approximately AD 300-700). Women would have worn the pendants, which were often inscribed with magical symbols or runes, for protection.
Some of the symbols seen in the newly raised bracteates are, according to experts, Mads Ravn, research director of the Vejle museum, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP). Interpreting them will help shed light on the little-known societies that inhabited the region before the Vikings.
“It is the symbolism represented on these objects that makes them unique, rather than the quantity found,” says Ravn.
One of the medallions depicts the Norse god Odin and appears to be based on similar Roman jewelry that celebrated emperors as gods, reports TV Syd.
Here we see Norse mythology in its infancy,” says Vang Petersen, quoted by The Sun. “Scandinavians have always been good at getting ideas from what they saw in foreign countries and then turning it into something that suits them.”
Many of the symbols seen on the bracteates are related to researchers. Vejle Counsel Center / Vejlemuseerne
The oldest artifacts found in the cache include gold coins from the Roman Empire that were fused into jewelry. One depicts Constantine the Great, who minted between AD 306 and 337. The presence of the coin suggests that Jelling, known to be the cradle of the Viking civilization between the 8th and 12th centuries, was a center of commerce with trade links across the European continent, according to ArteT News.
The immaculate craftsmanship of the objects points to the probable high status of its original owner.
“Only a member of the absolute top of society [would] have been able to collect a treasure like the one found here,” Ravn says in the statement.
When experts excavated the site where Schytz found the treasure, they discovered the ruins of a village longhouse. Without the amateur treasure hunter’s discovery, “there was nothing that could [make us] predict that an unprecedented warlord or great man lived here, long before the kingdom of Denmark arose in the following centuries,” he adds. Ravp.
Archaeologists postulate that the gold was mined to protect it from invaders or as a last-minute offering to the gods. The find dates to around 536, when a volcanic eruption in Iceland covered the sky in ash and caused widespread famine in Scandinavia. Other gold hoards found in the region, including a group of 32 artifacts discovered on the island of Hjarno, date from this same time.
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