A Viking treasure hoard of silver and gold, traded and looted from across Europe and as far afield as Asia and north Africa, and lost for more than 1,000 years, was revealed to public view again Thursday at the British Museum.
The find is one of the most spectacular recent discoveries from anywhere in the Viking empire: 600 coins, some unique, from as far as Samarkand in central Asia, Afghanistan, Russia and north Africa, hidden in a silver and gold pot.
"This is the world in a vessel," said Jonathan Williams, of the British Museum.
PHOTO: AP
The hoard was found in January near Harrogate, Yorkshire, by David and Andrew Whelan, father and son hobby metal detector enthusiasts. It was in a bare field due to be ploughed for spring sowing. They first found fragments of the lead sheeting which once protected it, then the pot itself. They could see coins and scraps of silver poking out, but heroically restrained themselves and brought the whole thing intact to their local archaeological finds officer.
The site seems then as now to have been an empty field: archaeologists scoured it for evidence, but found no trace of any settlement or structure.
The Whelans' patience - which helped preserve priceless clues as to how and when the hoard was hidden - was rewarded when the British Museum invited them to watch while conservator Hayley Bullock delicately tweezered the treasure out of the hard-packed ground. An X-ray had revealed only what she called "a lot of stuff."
Gradually the contents of the bowl spread out along the archaeologists' bench: a gold arm ring possibly made in Ireland, silver rings and brooches, dress ornaments, ingots, the chopped up scraps of silver which the Vikings used by weight as cash, and coins, many in superb condition, by the score. "If somebody asked me to fit it all back in now, I'm not sure I could," Bullock said yesterday.
The find goes some way to revive the more traditional image of the Vikings as fearsome raiders, after their recent rehabilitation as farmers, sailors and amiable trading folk in their kingdom of York and Northumbria.
The treasure was crammed into an exquisite silver pot, decorated with incised lions and deer, plated inside with pure gold because it once held the communion bread for some wealthy church in northern France.
Barry Ager, a British Museum expert on the Vikings in northern Europe, said it could have been looted, or given in unwilling tribute to persuade the raiders to go and loot somewhere else. A very similar one, possibly made by the same craftsman, was found in Lancashire more than a century ago. It arrived in Britain by equally dubious means.
The archaeologists believe the collection was probably assembled in England, as the contents are typical of other found hoards - though more spectacular.
It demonstrates the extraordinary geographical spread of precious metal being used as currency in Yorkshire, centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Vikings could go anywhere that their long, narrow, shallow-keeled boats would carry them. They fought as mercenaries in armies across Europe and down into north Africa, including the siege of Constantinople, and crossed the steppes into Asia.
The valuables they collected, by whatever means, were bought, sold and traded all the way back along their sea lanes, to Viking cities such as Dublin, Liverpool and York.
The clue to why the Harrogate treasure was hidden lay in the bowl itself, archaeologists found. The latest coin was minted in 927 AD, by the Anglo Saxon king Athelstan, who was the first to proclaim himself "King of All Britain" - the most serious challenge to Viking power was closing on Harrogate, and the archaeologists are not surprised the owner was never able to go back to retrieve his hoard.
The find was formally declared treasure on Thursday by the North Yorkshire coroner, Geoff Fell, who said it was one of the most exciting cases he had ever encountered.
Its value has still to be determined by the treasure valuation committee, but the British Museum, and the York Museum Trust, which already has a superb Viking collection, are braced to try to raise more than US$2 million to acquire the hoard. Once a value has been established the finders will split the amount with the landowner.
The Viking hoard is part of a torrent of new treasure finds reported since metal detectors and archaeologists agreed a formal code of conduct, with the amateurs undertaking to report all finds.
The ploughed field had yielded nothing much before to the Whelans, apart from 20th-century junk. So David, a 51-year-old semi-retired businessman from Leeds, initially thought he had scanned a rusting bicycle or bit of broken cattle trough when his detector started bleeping.
"We were sweeping and I got a signal, so I took a couple of shovels full of soil and there was a stronger one," he said outside the coroner's court in Harrogate after the hearing. "I just kept going and going. A ball of earth rolled out of the side of the hole and I could see a coin stuck in it. We dug the hole out. We crouched down on our hands and knees."
Neither of the of the Whelans has great plans for the money they will receive.
David Whelan said: "We don't need owt. We've got all we want. It's a thing of dreams to find something like this."
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
Last week the government announced that by year’s end Taiwan will have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world. Its inventory could exceed 1,400, or enough for the opening two hours of an invasion from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Snark aside, it sounds impressive. But an important piece is missing. Lost in all the “dialogues” and “debates” and “discussions” whose sole purpose is simply to dawdle and delay is what the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) alternative special defense budget proposal means for the defense of Taiwan. It is a betrayal of both Taiwan and the US. IT’S
March 16 to March 22 Hidden for decades behind junk-filled metal shacks, trees and overgrowth, a small domed structure bearing a Buddhist swastika resurfaced last June in a Taichung alley. It was soon identified as a remnant of the 122-year-old Gokokuzan Taichuu-ji (Taichung Temple, 護國山台中寺), which was thought to have been demolished in the 1980s. In addition, a stone stele dedicated to monk Hoshu Ono, who served as abbot from 1914 to 1930, was discovered in the detritus. The temple was established in 1903 as the local center for the Soto school
RSS