An 8-year-old girl unearths Stone Age dagger at her school in Norway
Elise, an 8-year-old student, found the Neolithic dagger while playing near her school in Norway.
While playing outside her school in Norway, an 8-year-old girl found an unexpected treasure — not a lost ball or a discarded jump rope, but a flint dagger crafted by Stone Age people 3,700 years ago.
The student, identified only as Elise in a statement translated from Norwegian, discovered the gray-brown dagger when she was playing in a rocky area by her school in Vestland County. “I was going to pick up a piece of glass, and then the stone was there,” she said in the statement.
Elise showed the stone to her teacher, Karen Drange, who saw that the stone looked ancient. Drange contacted Vestland county council, and archaeologists from the county examined the artifact.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) tool is a rare find, Louise Bjerre Petersen, an archaeologist with Vestland county municipality, said in the translated statement. Flint, a hard sedimentary rock, does not naturally occur in Norway, so the dagger may have come from across the North Sea in Denmark, according to the statement.
The nearly 5-inch-long (12 centimeters) flint dagger was likely crafted during the Neolithic period about 3,700 years ago.
This type of dagger is often found with sacrificial finds, the archaeologists added. To further investigate the area, the Vestland County Council and Vestland County’s University Museum in Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, teamed up to explore the school’s grounds. But they didn’t find any other evidence dating back to the Stone Age, they said in the statement.
Based on its style, the dagger likely dates to the New Stone Age, or the Neolithic, a time when prehistoric humans shaped stone tools and began to rely on domesticated plants and animals, build permanent villages and develop crafts, such as pottery.
In Norway, the Stone Age, which includes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic, lasted from 10000 B.C. to 1800 B.C., with a number of hunter-gatherers permanently settling down to farm around 2400 B.C., according to Talk Norway, an educational website on Norway’s history and cultural heritage.
The dagger will be cataloged and used in research at the University Museum. The artifact isn’t the only Stone Age discovery to recently get attention in Norway.
This past winter, the full-body reconstruction of a Stone Age teenager who lived 8,300 years ago went on display at the Hå Gamle Prestegard museum in southern Norway.
The teen boy was likely part of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer group, but the details surrounding his death are a mystery; it appears he died alone leaning against a cave wall, as his remains had no indications of a burial.
Modern humans migrated into Europe in 3 waves, ‘ambitious and provocative’ new study suggests
Evidence of the earliest migration of sapiens in all Europe is found at Grotte Mandrin (the rock at the center of the picture) in Mediterranean France.
It was long thought that modern humans first ventured into Europe about 42,000 years ago, but newly analyzed tools from the Stone Age have upended this idea. Now, evidence suggests that modern humans trekked into Europe in three waves between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, a new study finds.
Our species, Homo sapiens, arose in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and anatomically modern humans emerged at least 195,000 years ago.
Evidence for the first waves of modern humans outside Africa dates back at least 194,000 years to Israel, and possibly 210,000 years to Greece.
For years, the oldest confirmed signs of modern humans in Europe were teeth about 42,000 years old that archaeologists had unearthed in Italy and Bulgaria. These ancient groups were likely Protoaurignacians — the earliest members of the Aurignacians, the first known hunter-gatherer culture in Europe.
However, a 2022 study revealed that a tooth found in the site of Grotte Mandrin in southern France’s Rhône Valley suggested that modern humans lived there about 54,000 years ago, a 2022 study found. This suggested Europe was home to modern humans about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
In the 2022 study, scientists linked this fossil tooth with stone artifacts that scientists previously dubbed Neronian, after the nearby Grotte de Néron site. Neronian tools include tiny flint arrowheads or spearpoints and are unlike anything else found in Europe from that time.
Now, in a new study, an archaeologist argues that another wave of modern humans may have entered Europe between the 42,000-year-old Protoaurignacians and the 54,000-year-old Neronians. “It’s an in-depth rewriting of the historical structure of [the] arrival of sapiens in the continent,” study lead researcher Ludovic Slimak, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France, told Live Science in an email. He detailed his ideas in a study published on Wednesday (May 3) in the journal PLOS One.
These maps show evidence for three distinct waves of early migration of Homo sapiens in Europe from the East Mediterranean coast. In phase 1, the Neronians created tools about 54,000 years ago.
Stone Age evidence
Slimak focused on a group or “industry” of stone artifacts previously unearthed in the Levant, the eastern Mediterranean region that today includes Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Scientists have long thought that the Levant was a key gateway for modern humans migrating out of Africa.
When Slimak compared Neronian tools from Grotte Mandrin with the industry from about the same time from a site known as Ksar Akil in Lebanon, he found notable similarities. This suggested both groups were one and the same, with the Levantine group expanding into Europe over time. The much younger Protoaurignacian artifacts also have very similar counterparts in the Levant from a culture known as the Ahmarian, Slimak noted.
“I buil[t] a bridge between Europe and the East Mediterranean populations during the early migrations of sapiens in the continent,” Slimak said.
In addition, Slimak found thousands of modern human flint artifacts from the Levant that existed in the period known as the Early Upper Paleolithic, between the Ksar Akil and the Ahmarian ones. This led him to look for possible modern human counterparts of these artifacts in Europe.
Stone artifacts from a European industry known as the Châtelperronian highly resemble modern human artifacts seen in the Early Upper Paleolithic of the Levant. In addition, Châtelperronian items date to about 45,000 years ago, or between those of the Neronians and the Protoaurignacians. However, scientists had often thought Châtelperronians were Neanderthals.
Slimak now argues the Châtelperronians were actually a second wave of modern humans into Europe. “We have here, and for the first time, a serious candidate for a non-Neanderthalian origin of these industries,” Slimak said.
This new model of modern human settlement of Europe is “ambitious and provocative,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who did not take part in the new study, told Live Science in an email. “Evidence has been building for a while that there were several early dispersals of Homo sapiens into Europe before the well-attested Aurignacian-associated one about 42,000 years ago.”
Future research can help confirm or disprove this new idea. “I see this paper generating a number of research projects to support or refute it,” Christian Tryon, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of Connecticut who helped translate the new study, told Live Science in an email. “People now need to look at some of the archaeological sites here with a critical eye to see if they see the same kinds of technical details reported by Slimak. This is the start of a long process, I suspect.”
Underwater Archaeologists Discover a 7,000-Year-Old Road in Croatia
A team of underwater archaeologists from the University of Zadar has discovered the sunken ruins of a 7,000-year-old road that once linked an ancient artificial landmass to the Croatian island of Korčula.
The road is located at a depth of 5 meters in sediment deposits at the submerged archaeological site of Soline, an artificial landmass and Neolithic settlement of the island Korčula and along with several other artifacts, belonged to a lost maritime culture known as the Hvar, who occupied this area during the Neolithic Era.
By radiocarbon analysis of preserved wood found in the last campaign, the entire settlement was dated around 4,900 years before Christ.
A four-meter-wide linear road made of stone slabs was discovered during a recent underwater survey of the site. People walked on this road almost 7,000 years ago.
Over the weekend, the University of Zadar released new footage of the underwater passage, which was made of stacked stones and measured some 12 feet across.
“In underwater archaeological research of the submerged neolithic site of Soline on the island of Korčula, archaeologists found remains that surprised them,” said the University of Zadar in a statement posted to Facebook on Sunday.
“Namely, beneath the layers of sea mud, they discovered a road that connected the sunken prehistoric settlement of the Hvar culture with the coast of the island of Korčula.”
According to the university, several scientists and organizations are working together on underwater research, which is being directed by archaeologist Mate Parica, who has been studying the location for a while.
The team also found fragments of millstones, flint blades, and stone axes among the underwater ruins.
The artifacts shed light on the enigmatic Hvar peoples, who first appeared on the islands and coasts of the northeast Adriatic Sea around 7,000 years ago.
Korčula is part of an archipelago in the Adriatic that was once a part of the continent.
The coastal valleys of the Dinaric Mountains began to flood as a result of the Earth’s ice cap melting after 12,000 BC, and by 6000 BC the archipelago had roughly reached its current configuration.
Archaeologists discover a new megalithic monument in the heart of Andalusia in southern Spain – a 5,000-year-old secret
Archaeologists in Spain uncovered a previously overlooked tomb while investigating the formation of La Peña de los Enamorados, also known as the sleeping giant.
The Antequera archaeological site in southern Spain is home to a number of ancient structures dating back to the third and fourth millennia BC, including the Menga, Viera, and El Romeral megaliths.
According to a study that was published on April 15 in the journal Antiquity, the Antequera site contains both man-made and “natural monuments,” but is best known for its prehistoric megaliths.
The “natural monuments” at the site include La Peña de los Enamorados, a stone “sleeping giant” that towers about 2,900 feet above the ground, researchers said.
The Sleeping Giant had a 5000-year-old secret hidden in his chest: Piedras Blancas megalithic grave.
The rectangular stone structure was built at least 5,000 years ago, according to the study. It was used for millennia in three distinct phases before being abandoned between 1950 and 1180 B.C.
General view of the excavated Piedras Blancas tomb or megalithic grave from the east, with the numbering of the stones. At the far end, the two ‘arrow-like’ slabs are attached to the bedrock.
Lead author of the new paper, Leonardo García Sanjuán, a Professor in Prehistory at the University of Seville (Spain), said the location of the Piedras Blancas tomb was “carefully chosen.”
The tomb’s stone slabs were carefully arranged to coincide “with the summer solstice sunrise,” researchers said. Some of the “heavily engraved” slabs “appear to have been precisely placed to ‘funnel’ the light from the rising sun towards the back of the chamber at the summer solstice.”
In Antequera, the oldest megaliths date back to 3,000 BC, and this rectangular stone tomb was built at the same time. Researchers believe that bodies were spread out on a sizable flat stone platform at the time ceramic offerings were left in the tomb. Later, the decomposing corpses were pushed off the stone platform and into the surrounding area, where the researchers discovered “40 teeth and 95 bones.”
A skeleton is buried in the added burial niches at the Piedras Blancas tomb.
Furthermore, the archaeologists identified a “triangular, arrow-like stone” lodged into the floor, oriented in the direction of the rising sun.
The Piedras Blancas tomb was renovated around 2500 B.C., and niches for two burials were added, according to the study. Researchers believe these were high-status individuals, most likely a man and a woman. It’s unclear whether they were buried simultaneously or over the course of a century.
The tomb later “underwent another significant transformation,” according to researchers. Stones were placed at the entrance “as if to block or seal” it, and the bones of at least two children and three women were interred.
According to the study, the tomb was abandoned and has remained untouched ever since.
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
‘Lost’ microbial genes found in dental plaque of ancient humans
About 19,000 years ago, a woman died in northern Spain. Her body was deliberately buried with pieces of the natural pigment ochre and placed behind a block of limestone in a cave known as El Mirón.
When her ochre-dyed bones were unearthed in 2010, archaeologists dubbed her the Red Lady. The careful treatment of her body provided scientists with insights into how people from the time buried their dead.
Now, thanks to the poor oral hygiene of that period, her teeth are helping illuminate a vanished world of bacteria and their chemical creations. From dental calculus, the rock-hard plaque that accumulates on teeth, researchers have successfully recovered and reconstructed the genetic material of bacteria living in the mouth of the Red Lady and dozens of other ancient individuals.
The gene reconstructions, reported today in Science, were accurate enough to replicate the enzymes the bacteria produced to help digest nutrients. “Just the fact that they were able to reconstruct the genome from a puzzle with millions of pieces is a great achievement,” says Gary Toranzos, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Puerto Rico who wasn’t involved in the work. “It’s ‘hold my beer, and watch me do it,’ and boy did they do it.”
Changes in diet and the introduction of antibiotics have dramatically altered the modern human microbiome, says University of Trento computational biologist Nicola Segata, who also wasn’t involved.
Sequencing ancient microbes and re-creating their chemical creations “will help us identify what functions our microbiome might have had in the past that we might have lost,” he says. Resurrecting these “lost” genes may one day help scientists devise new treatments for diseases, adds Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a molecular paleoecologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Within the past few decades, sequencing ancient DNA has illuminated physical and physiological features of long-dead organisms, but researchers have also used the same technique to examine the genes belonging to the teeming bacterial communities, or microbiomes, that once populated the mouths and guts of long-dead people.
That work has given them insights into which microbial species might have coexisted with humans before the advent of antibiotics and processed foods. But such understanding has been limited by the fact that researchers could only use modern microbes as references.
“We were limited to bacteria we know from today,” says Harvard University geneticist Christina Warinner, a co-author of the new study. “We were ignoring vast amounts of DNA from unknown or possibly extinct organisms.”
Breaking that barrier presented a monumental challenge. Reconstructing an oral microbiome—a soup of hundreds of different bacterial species, and millions of individual bacteria—from degraded ancient DNA is “like throwing together pieces of many puzzles and trying to solve them with the pieces mixed up and some pieces missing entirely,” Segata says.
Indeed, it took Warinner’s team nearly 3 years to adapt DNA sequencing tools and computer programs to work with the much shorter fragments of DNA found in ancient samples.
At long last, drawing on dental calculus from 46 ancient skeletons—including a dozen Neanderthals and modern humans who died between 30,000 and 150 years ago—Warinner and colleagues identified DNA from dozens of extinct or previously unknown oral bacteria.
Next, the team equipped modern Pseudomonas protegens bacteria with a pair of ancient genes to make proteins that produce milligrams’ worth of a molecule called a furan.
Modern bacteria are thought to use furans for cellular signaling. The new findings suggest ancient bacteria did, too—something that would have been impossible to predict by simply sequencing their genomes. “It’s wet-lab proof of what ancient genes were capable of,” says Pierre Stallforth of the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology. “You can predict proteins based on DNA, but not necessarily the molecules those proteins are going to make.”
At first glance, the microbe they reconstructed seemed out of place in an oral microbiome. Identified as a type of bacterium called a chlorobium, its modern relatives use photosynthesis to survive on small amounts of light and live in anaerobic conditions, such as stagnant water. They aren’t found in modern mouths and appear to have vanished from ancient humans about 10,000 years ago.
This chlorobium might have entered the mouths of ancient people because they drank water in or near caves. Or, Warinner says, it might once have been a normal part of some people’s ancient oral microbiome, surviving on faint light penetrating the cheek.
Colleagues say dental calculus was an ideal place to start looking for these ancient microbes. Without regular cleaning, teeth trap leftover food and other organic matter in a mineral lattice, essentially encasing it in stone. That both helps preserve any DNA inside and protect it from contamination as the body decays. “Oral calculus is the perfect example of the best place you can find an uncontaminated sample,” Toranzos says. “There’s absolutely no way anything from the outside will get in.”
Although the researchers succeeded in prodding modern bacteria to express their previously undiscovered or extinct cousins’ genes, it’s a far cry from Jurassic Park, Warinner says. “We haven’t brought [the microbes] back to life, but identified key genes for making chemical compounds we’re interested in,” Warinner says.
The recovery of ancient microbial genes has the potential to illuminate our species’ relationship with bacteria over human evolution. Humans coevolved with their microbial partners and parasites for hundreds of thousands of years. The compounds produced by ancient microbes might have played important roles in digestion and immune responses. “Bacteria are not as charismatic as mammoths or woolly rhinos,” she says, “but they are nature’s chemists, and they’re key to understanding the past.”
Possible Greek Tomb Detected in Naples With Cosmic Rays
A 3D view of the site with the four inferred reference points of Chamber 3 shown as green spheres.
Cosmic rays and lasers have revealed that deep underneath the city streets of Naples, Italy, lie the remains of the Greeks who originally settled the area, as well as the catacombs of Christians who lived there during the Roman era nearly two millennia ago, a new study finds.
Researchers have long known that ancient Greek burials were hidden beneath the city, but weren’t able to access all of them. Now, these cutting-edge techniques have enabled researchers to peer into the earth without any digging.
Originally founded as Cumae and later renamed Neapolis (“New City”) around 650 B.C., the area now known as Naples boasted temples, a forum and numerous underground tombs. In the highly populated and picturesque modern district of Rione Sanità, tombs from multiple stages of occupation are known — from the Greek Hellenistic period (sixth to third centuries B.C.), there are burial chambers for the wealthy called hypogea, and from the later Roman period (second to fourth centuries A.D.), there are early Christian catacombs.
But the layers of contemporary buildings make it difficult to access ancient sewers, cisterns and tombs 33 feet (10 meters) underneath the streets, so a group of Italian and Japanese researchers hypothesized that they could identify previously unknown burial hypogea from the Hellenistic period using 21st-century techniques.
Their study, published April 3 in the journal Scientific Reports, details how they used muography to detect underground voids that were unknown to archaeologists.
A schematic drawing of the underground level at the depth of 33 feet (10 meters) with Greek funeral chambers numbered from 1 to 11. Chambers 2 and 3 are unknown and their existence was hinted at by the integrated site topology reconstructed with 3D surveys.
A muon is a subatomic particle similar to an electron but with a greater mass. In 1936, scientists discovered that muons are produced by cosmic rays in Earth’s atmosphere, and that these tiny particles can easily penetrate walls and rocks, scattering in open spaces.
In this study, the muons’ tracks were recorded using nuclear emulsion technology, in which extremely sensitive photographic film is used to capture and visualize the paths of the charged particles.
By measuring muon flux — how many muons arrive in a particular area over time — and direction using a particle detector, researchers can peer into volcanoes, underground cavities and even the Egyptian pyramids through muography.
However, placing the particle detectors requires some strategizing to catch the muons’ movement.
The researchers were most interested in scanning the Hellenistic necropolis, located about 33 feet under the current surface, which meant finding a stable place even deeper than that to set up the equipment, which looks a little like a flatbed scanner.
“The big general limitation for muography is that the detector has to be placed below the target level because the muons come from the sky or the upper hemisphere,” study lead author Valeri Tioukov, a physicist at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), told Live Science in an email. “For archaeology, it’s applicable if there is some space for the detector placement below the target level.”
Tioukov and his colleagues placed the muon tracking devices 59 feet (18 m) underground, in a 19th-century cellar that was used for aging ham, where they recorded the muon flux for 28 days, capturing about 10 million muons.
In order to identify unknown structures, the researchers needed a 3D model of what was already known to exist underground.
The 3D laser scans of the accessible structures can then be compared with the measured muon flux. Anomalies in the muon flux images that are not visible in the 3D model can be confidently assumed to be hidden or unknown cavities.
A nuclear emulsion detector in place at 59 feet (18 meters) below the ground surface.
Muography revealed an excess of muons in the data that can be explained only by the presence of a new burial chamber.
The chamber’s area measures roughly 6.5 by 11.5 feet (2 by 3.5 m), according to the study, and its rectangular shape indicates it is human-made rather than natural.
Given the chamber’s depth, the researchers think it was a part of the Hellenistic necropolis dating to the sixth to the third centuries B.C. Likely the tomb of a wealthy individual, the hypogeum may be similar to those first discovered in the late 19th century, the Hypogeum of the Toga-wearers and the Hypogeum of the Pomegranates, both of which can be visited today as part of underground tours of Naples.
“The prospect of identifying and discovering new tomb chambers is obviously appetizing,” Rabun Taylor, a Roman archaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.
“Some of these Hellenistic tombs and burials on the north side of town yielded goods made of clay, bronze, and iron” when they were discovered a century ago, Taylor said, “so it would be wonderful to unearth some new chambers using modern methods.” But this would be a challenging archaeological undertaking, he pointed out, due to the expense and effort needed as well as the fact that the area is densely populated.
Muography unfortunately cannot reveal what is inside the chamber. “In this configuration, there is no way to resolve objects of less than 10 cm [4 inches] in size,” Tioukov said. “So we can potentially see the approximate shape of the room, but not small details like bones.”
The hoard of 175 silver Roman coins, worth tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money in just face value alone, was found in 2021 near Livorno in Tuscany.
A hoard of 175 silver coins unearthed in a forest in Italy may have been buried for safekeeping during a Roman civil war.
The coins seem to date from 82 B.C., the year the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla fought a bloody war across Italy against his enemies among the leaders of the Roman Republic, which resulted in Sulla’s victory and his ascension as dictator of the Roman state.
The archaeologists who investigated the hoard of 175 silver Roman denarii — the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money — suggested it may have been buried by a Roman soldier who was then killed in battle.
Archaeologists think the coins were deliberately buried in a small terracotta pot in about 82 B.C. to keep them safe during a time of war.
But historian Federico Santangelo, a professor who heads Classics and Ancient History at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, said it also could have been buried by a businessman who wanted to keep his money safe during turbulent times. “I don’t think we should trace this money to a soldier, although in principle it is possible,” he told Live Science. Santangelo was not involved in the discovery.
The chronologies of such coin hoards show that many were buried during wars and upheavals. “A number of people at times of crisis buried their stash of money and for whatever reason were prevented from retrieving it,” Santangelo said.
Excavations revealed no other archaeological objects at the site where the coin hoard was found, but the remains of a Roman-era farm had been found in the past about half a mile away.
Coin hoard
Researchers discovered the coin hoard buried in a terracotta pot in 2021 but kept it secret so that the site could be completely investigated.
Lorella Alderighi, an archaeologist with the provincial office for archaeology, told Live Science the coins were discovered by a member of an archaeological group in a newly-cut area of forest northeast of the city of Livorno in Tuscany.
Archaeological investigations revealed the earliest coins dated from 157 or 156 B.C., while the most recent was from 83 or 82 B.C., she said.
The area was probably forested then as it is now, on a small hill overlooking a swamp. The remains of a Roman farm had previously been found about half a mile (1 kilometer) away, she said.
“The coins have definitely been hidden — they constituted a ‘treasure’ or piggy bank,” she said. “The easiest way to hide valuables was to bury them underground, away from homes where no one could find them.”
The coins were first spotted by a member of the Livorno Palaeontological Archaeological Group walking through a new forest cutting.
But whoever buried the coins never returned to recover them, and Alderighi proposed that the owner may have been a Roman soldier caught up in the conflicts.
“These coins may have been the savings of a soldier returning home [during] military service,” she said. “He had hidden them because they constituted a useful sum, perhaps to buy and start his own farm.”
Several such coin hoards have been found in Italy; studies show many of them were buried at times of war or upheaval. Here we see over 100 found coins, all bagged and numbered.
Turbulent times
Alderighi noted that the hoard was buried during a troubled period in Italian history.
A few years earlier, Italy had been gripped by the Social War between Rome and its Italian allies, while in 82 B.C. Sulla had just returned with his legions from Asia to confront his enemies in Rome, having already attacked the city in 88 B.C. and been declared a public enemy in 87 B.C.
“It was a very turbulent historical period,” she said. “Sulla’s soldiers conquered territories as they advanced from south to north. But central Italy and Tuscany had not yet been conquered.”
Santangello added that Sulla’s victory in late 82 B.C. was almost a “blueprint” for later Roman rulers.
His victory was followed about 30 years later by a much larger Roman civil war between Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the Great, who rose to power as a deputy to Sulla. And Caesar’s victory in that war led directly to the rise to power of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, in 27 B.C.
“It became abundantly clear to everyone that whoever came out as the winner of the civil war would be — maybe not by law, but certainly in reality — the master of Rome,” Santangello said.
Rare, 1,000-year-old Viking Age iron hoard found in a basement in Norway
A rare stash of 1,000-year-old ironwork, which sat for 40 years in a family’s basement in Norway, is now seeing the light of day after a woman discovered the hoard during some spring cleaning.
The Viking hoard consists of 32 iron ingots, which are all pierced with a hole on one end and may have been grouped together in a bundle.
The hoard consists of 32 iron ingots that look like small spatulas and date back to the Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) or the high Middle Ages (1066 to 1350). The rods are identical and weigh about 1.8 ounces (50 grams) each, prompting archeologists to think they may have been used as a form of currency and that someone probably buried them with the intention of coming back for the treasure later.
“We call it a cache find because it is clear that someone has [buried it] to hide it,” Kjetil Loftsgarden, an archeologist and associate professor at the University of Oslo and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, told NRK News. Each ingot is pierced with a hole on one end, which suggests the ingots could have been tied together in a bunch, experts added.
While similar ironwork already exists in the museum’s collections, this discovery is rare because construction projects often destroy or damage buried treasures, Loftsgarden said. In this case, Grete Margot Sørum, who came across the treasure trove while clearing out her parents’ basement in Valdres, central Norway, told NRK News that she remembers her father finding the stash while he dug a well by the house in the 1980s. “But then he put them away in a corner,” Sørum said.
The last time someone unearthed a hoard of iron ingots in Valdres was 100 years ago, according to NRK News.
From the late Viking Age until the high Middle Ages, independent farmers in southern Norway produced iron on a massive scale, according to a 2019 study by Loftsgarden, published in Fornvännen, the Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research.
The region was so productive that there was a surplus of iron, which traders sold to elites in the more populated coastal regions of Norway.
Sørum’s father unearthed the ingots from a site located along the Bergen Royal Road, known as Kongevegen, which served as a trade route between Oslo and Bergen 1,000 years ago.
The area around the site was dotted with charcoal pits, which were indispensable to iron production for smelting during the Viking and Middle Ages, Loftsgarden wrote in the study.
Sørum notified the Valdres Folkemuseum in Fagernes, which then forwarded the iron collection to the Cultural Heritage section of the Innlandet county municipality. The iron hoard is now stored at the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, where archeologists will study and catalog the artifacts.
“Old finds that are handed into the archeologists provide new knowledge about the history of the Inland,” Anne Engesveen, unit leader for archeology at the Cultural Heritage section, said in a statement.
The discovery of the iron collection in the Sørum family basement is not the first Viking find from Norway in recent months. In November 2022, a metal detectorist stumbled across a Viking treasure hoard consisting of a pair of silver rings, fragments of a silver bracelet, and what look like chopped-up Arabic coins, among other buried artifacts.
