She cleaned it and became a millionaire. A Norwegian woman finds a treasure dating back to the Viking Age in the basement of her house.
She cleaned it and became a millionaire. A Norwegian woman finds a treasure dating back to the Viking Age in the basement of her house.
A woman in the Norwegian city of Valdres found a treasure dating back to the Viking Age in the basement of her parents' house.
The municipality of the Inlandet region indicates in its statement that Greta Margot Ciorum realized that the 32 iron ingots she found when she was cleaning the cellar had historical importance.
So I reported it to experts, who attributed it to the Viking Age or early Middle Ages.
“We call it a cache discovery because obviously someone [buried it] to hide it,” Kjetil Loftsgarden, an archaeologist and associate professor at the University of Oslo and Oslo Museum of Cultural History, told NRK News.
Experts added that each alloy is perforated with a hole at one end. Which suggests that the alloys could have been bonded together in a group.
Scientist Loftsgaarden said that while similar ironwork already exists in museum collections, the discovery is rare because construction projects often destroy or damage buried treasures.
According to the Norwegian state media organization NRK, Greta's father found these iron ingots in the 1980s when he was digging a well and placed them in the basement of the house.
Experts believe that someone hid these pieces in order to return later to take them, but he did not return.
These ingots are long and have a hole at one end, perhaps to connect them. Each ingot weighs 50 grams. Perhaps according to scholars it was used as money.
The last time someone discovered a hoard of iron bullion in Valdres was 100 years ago, according to NRK News.
From the late Viking Age until the Middle Ages, independent farmers in southern Norway produced iron on a large scale.
The region was so productive that there was a surplus of iron, which merchants sold to elites in Norway's more populated coastal areas.
Sorum's father discovered the bullion from a site along Bergen's Royal Road, known as Kongevegen, which served as a trade route between Oslo and Bergen 1,000 years ago.
The area surrounding the site was full of coal pits, which were indispensable for producing iron for smelting during the Viking and Middle Ages.
The iron hoard is now stored in the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, where archaeologists will study and classify the artifacts.
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