The Spillings Hoard ( sv, Spillingsskatten) is the world's largest
Viking
Vikings ; non, víkingr is the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden),
who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and se ...
silver treasure, found on Friday 16July 1999 in a field at the Spilling farm northwest of
Slite
Slite is a locality situated in Gotland Municipality, Gotland County, on the island of Gotland, Sweden with 1,500 inhabitants in 2014.
Geography
Slite is situated on the northern east coast of Gotland. The town is divided by the Sjuströmmar in ...
, on northern
Gotland, Sweden. The silver hoard consisted of two parts with a total weight of before
conservation
Conservation is the preservation or efficient use of resources, or the conservation of various quantities under physical laws.
Conservation may also refer to:
Environment and natural resources
* Nature conservation, the protection and managem ...
and consisted of, among other things, 14,295 coins most of which were
Islamic from other countries. A third deposition containing over of
bronze scrap-metal was also found. The three caches had been hidden under the floorboards of a Viking outhouse sometime during the 9th century.
Discovery
On Friday 16July 1999, a team of reporters from the Swedish television
TV4 TV4 or TV 4 may refer to:
*TV4 (Poland), a private Polish television station
*TV4 (Sweden), a Swedish television network
**TV4 Group, owners of the Swedish television station
*South African Broadcasting Corporation TV4, a channel operated by the st ...
were in the
socken
Socken is the name used for a part of a county in Sweden. In Denmark similar areas are known as ''sogn'', in Norway ''sokn'' or ''sogn'' and in Finland ''pitäjä'' ''(socken)''. A socken is a country-side area that was formed around a church, ...
of Othem on Gotland to film a cultural feature from
Almedalen Week. They chose to do a segment on the problem with
looting of archaeological sites with archaeologist Jonas Ström acting as their guide along with Kenneth Jonsson, a professor of
numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, medals and related objects.
Specialists, known as numismatists, are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, but the discipline also includ ...
, who happened to be on the island at that time. Spillings farm was selected for the filming since about 150 silver coins and bronze objects had been found there earlier by the landowner Björn Engström.
With filming complete, Ström and Jonsson decided to continue their survey of the field. Twenty minutes after the TV-crew had left, they heard a strong signal from their
metal detector
A metal detector is an instrument that detects the nearby presence of metal. Metal detectors are useful for finding metal objects on the surface, underground, and under water. The unit itself, consist of a control box, and an adjustable shaft, ...
, which led them to the smaller of the two silver caches. A couple of hours later and only from the first find, they received another signal from the detector:
The site was hurriedly cordoned off, back-up crew from the museum was sent for, permission for an archaeological excavation was immediately sought at the
County Administrative Board
A county administrative board ( sv, länsstyrelse) is a Swedish Government Agency in each of the counties of Sweden, led by a vice-regal governor ( sv, landshövding) appointed by the government for a term of six years. The lists of gubernatorial o ...
and guards were posted. However, instead of keeping the find a secret, the
Gotland Museum
The Gotland Museum ( sv, Gotlands museum) (previously known as ''Länsmuseet på Gotland'' or ''Gotlands Fornsal'') in Visby, Sweden, is the county museum of Gotland. It was founded by the Friends of Gotland's Antiquity society in 1875, at the in ...
decided to go public with the find immediately. During the first weekend, over 2,000 people visited the excavation site.
Some days later, the metal detector indicated a third metal cache approximately from the first find. The archaeologists concentrated on uncovering the two first finds before starting with the third. Due to the size of the hoards and the fragility of the objects, the bottom layers of the depositions were encapsulated in plaster. Only when they tried to lift the finds out of the soil did the archaeologists realize how heavy the hoards were. The smaller weighed and the larger one . An attempt to X-ray the finds at the local hospital failed because they contained so much silver that the X-ray plates remained blank.
The larger find was intact but the smaller had been damaged by a plough. A previous landowner who visited the excavation commented that he had found metal wires around the find-spot several years earlier, but thinking that they were only steel wire, he had thrown them away. It was therefore concluded that the treasure had originally been even larger.
With the two first caches taken care of, the third deposition was excavated almost a year after the first discovery. It contained over of bronze scrap-metal, most of which had been partially melted into a 'cake'. This find was deemed even more valuable since very few finds contain such large amounts of bronze intended for smelting.
Further excavations
![Location of depositories in stone foundation, Spillings](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Location_of_depositories_in_stone_foundation%2C_Spillings.jpg)
Additional excavations were conducted in the summer of 2000 and in 2003-06. Remnants of wood, iron rivets and mounts as well as a lock mechanism were found, leading to the conclusion that the caches had been stored in chests.
An extended survey and excavation revealed the foundations of a building and indicated that the hoards had been placed under the floorboards of what would probably have been a warehouse, shed or storage rather than a dwelling since it had no hearth. Carbon dating showed that the building had been in use between 540 and 1040. The foundations and the remaining
posthole
In archaeology a posthole or post-hole is a cut feature used to hold a surface timber or stone. They are usually much deeper than they are wide; however, truncation may not make this apparent. Although the remains of the timber may survive, most ...
s indicated a regular Viking Age structure, about with a slanting
sedge
The Cyperaceae are a family of graminoid (grass-like), monocotyledonous flowering plants known as sedges. The family is large, with some 5,500 known species described in about 90 genera, the largest being the "true sedges" genus '' Carex'' ...
-covered roof, much like other similar finds on Gotland. It had been built on an older Iron Age foundation.
Find
The silver deposits were roughly square-shaped with rounded corners, about , suggesting that they had been in sacks of cloth, leather or pelt, inside boxes or chests of wood. In the bronze deposit were found substantial pieces of wood and iron, such as fittings, ironwork, nails and a lock-device, showing that the bronze had been kept in a sturdy chest. A carbon dating of the chest dated it to approximately 675, making it older than the objects stored inside it.
Although silver hoards and treasures are not unusual on Gotland, this was an exceptionally large find. One explanation may be found in the location near some of the island's best and most significant harbours during the Viking Age. The silver in the caches would have been enough to pay the tax to the Swedish king for all of Gotland for five years.
The following surveys and excavations of the fields surrounding the find-site showed that the site had been inhabited continuously over 1,000 years up until the 19th century. Over 700 more objects were retrieved, such as objects of bronze and copper, fired clay,
clothes pins, a piece of glass, tile pieces, chains, needles, glass beads, slag, iron nails, polished
semi-precious stones and brick.
The Spillings Hoard is the world's largest Viking silver treasure. A finder's fee of
SEK 2,091,672 (approx. US$242,400) was paid to the landowner for the treasure, although the real value of it is much higher. It was the largest amount of money ever paid for a find in Sweden, according to director of the
Swedish National Heritage Board Sven Göthe. The hoard was dated to have been hidden some time after 870–71. The treasure is on permanent display in the Gotland Museum.
, more than of silver from over 700 caches deposited between the 9th and 12th centuries have been found on Gotland. This includes 168,000 silver coins from the
Arab world
The Arab world ( ar, اَلْعَالَمُ الْعَرَبِيُّ '), formally the Arab homeland ( '), also known as the Arab nation ( '), the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, refers to a vast group of countries, mainly located in Western A ...
,
North Africa
North Africa, or Northern Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, and it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Mauritania in ...
and
Central Asia
Central Asia, also known as Middle Asia, is a subregion, region of Asia that stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to western China and Mongolia in the east, and from Afghanistan and Iran in the south to Russia in the north. It includes t ...
.
Silver depositions
The caches contained silver objects ranging from coins, bars, thread and
hacksilver
Hacksilver (sometimes referred to as hacksilber) consists of fragments of cut and bent silver items that were used as bullion or as currency by weight in antiquity.
Use
Hacksilver was common among the Norsemen or Vikings, as a result of both t ...
to be used as raw material, to jewelry such as fingerings, bangles and pendants. Much of the material had been bundled up to correspond with the mark-weight system of the Viking Age, in which made one
mark
Mark may refer to:
Currency
* Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina
* East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic
* Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927
* F ...
.
Almost 60% of the find consisted of 486
bangles or parts thereof, making it the largest ever find of such silver jewellery . Most of the bracelets weighed around 100 grams under the mark-weight system and were of traditional Gotlandic design, a number of them have very detailed ornamentation. There were also bangles of British and Western Scandinavian design as well as plain, undecorated fingerings of Finnish and British design, known as ''ring money''.
![Khazar coin Spillings Hoard](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Khazar_coin_Spillings_Hoard.jpg)
Of the 14,295 coins found, 14,200 were Islamic
dirhams, four were Nordic (from
Hedeby
Hedeby (, Old Norse ''Heiðabýr'', German ''Haithabu'') was an important Danish Viking Age (8th to the 11th centuries) trading settlement near the southern end of the Jutland Peninsula, now in the Schleswig-Flensburg district of Schleswig-Holst ...
), one was
Byzantine
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...
and 23 were from
Persia
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
. The earliest, a Persian coin, dates from 539 and the latest from 870.
Many of the coins (as well as the bangles) had marks that may have been made when the purity of the silver was
tested
''Tested'' is a live album by punk rock band Bad Religion. It was recorded in the USA, Canada, Germany, Estonia, Denmark, Italy and Austria, in 1996, and released in 1997. It is Bad Religion's second live album. Instead of using crowd microphon ...
. There were several imitations and fakes among the coins. The illegal copies were made from good silver, but made in other places than where the originals were minted. All in all, 69 different minting locations from 15 present-day countries were identified in the hoard.
During the conservation work of the larger hoard (No 2) it became evident that the larger objects had been placed at the bottom of the cache and the smaller ones, ending with the cut coins, had been strewn on top.
Moses coin
One of the most noted coins in the hoard, dated to 800, is from the
Khazar Kingdom and designated the "Moses Coin". According to written sources the Khazars are believed to be of the Jewish religion, but few objects have been found to support this claim.
The coin is inscribed with "Moses is the messenger of God" instead of the usual Muslim text "Muhammad is the messenger of God".
Bronze deposition
![The s k cake Spillings Bronze Hoard](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/The_s_k_cake_Spillings_Bronze_Hoard.jpg)
Excavated in the same manner as the silver hoards, the bronze cache was encapsulated on site and transported to the Gotland Museum for further examination. The objects were removed layer after layer from top to bottom until the large melted 'cake', about in diameter was uncovered. Most of the bronze objects were broken, fragmented or partially melted, suggesting that they were kept in the heartwood chest to be used as raw material for new artifacts. Individual finds consisted of parts of, and some complete, necklaces, bangles, fingerings, pins for clothes and mounts for drinking horns. The bronze objects span a period of 200–300 years and are mostly of
Baltic
Baltic may refer to:
Peoples and languages
* Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian
*Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originati ...
origin or possibly Russian with only a few of them Scandinavian. Even though several scholars have been involved in identifying the deposition, no consensus have been reached regarding why the hoard was collected or the dating of it. Two theories are that it was either the stock of a foundryman living on Gotland, or booty from a Viking raid that was hidden under the floor of the outhouse.
Gallery
File:Silver bars Spillings Hoard 2.jpg, Silver melted into bars from hoard No 2.
File:Silver tangle Spillings Hoard 1.jpg, Silver tangle from hoard No 1. This one weighs about 2000 gram, about 10 silver marks in the old Gotlandic system where silver was used as currency.
File:Coins Spilling Silver Hoard 2 closeup.jpg, Closeup of silver coins from hoard No 2.
File:Iron fittings from a chest Spilling Hoard.jpg, Iron fittings from the chest in the bronze cache.
See also
*
Havor Hoard
The Havor hoard ( sv, Havorskatten) is an Iron Age treasure found in 1961, in Hablingbo on the Swedish island of Gotland. It consists of a large gold torc, known as the Havor Ring, along with several well-preserved bronze objects and was buried ...
*
Cuerdale Hoard
The Cuerdale Hoard is a hoard of more than 8,600 items, including silver coins, English and Carolingian jewellery, hacksilver and ingots. It was discovered on 15 May 1840 on the southern bank of a bend of the River Ribble, in an area called Cu ...
*
Silverdale Hoard
*
Sundveda Hoard
The Sundveda Hoard ( sv, Sundvedaskatten) is a Viking Age hoard of 482 silver coins found in 2008 in Sundveda between Märsta and Sigtuna, not far from Stockholm in Sweden. It is the largest silver hoard found in the Mälaren region since 1827. ...
*
Molnby Hoard
*
Vale of York Hoard
The Vale of York Hoard, also known as the Harrogate Hoard and the Vale of York Viking Hoard, is a 10th-century Viking hoard of 617 silver coins and 65 other items. It was found undisturbed in 2007 near the town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire, ...
*
Mildenhall Treasure
The Mildenhall Treasure is a large hoard of 34 masterpieces of Roman silver tableware from the fourth century AD, and by far the most valuable Roman objects artistically and by weight of bullion in Britain. It was found at West Row, near Mild ...
References
Bibliography
*
{{Commons category, Spillings Hoard
Viking treasure troves
Silver objects
Archaeological artifacts
Archaeology of Sweden
Scandinavian culture
Hoards of jewellery
1999 in Sweden
1999 archaeological discoveries