Knowledge of the past helps shape the future.
That’s why historic discoveries have so much significance.
And the mind-blowing discovery these archaeologists made inside a 12th-century Christian cave will leave you floored.
Swedish archaeologists went on a dig and literally found buried treasure.
Kristina Jansson and Anna Ödéen discovered a Christian grave with a rare characteristic: it contained coins and jewelry.
Ödéen, the project manager, wrote in a statement, “Kristina Jansson and I found two skeletons in the shaft where the wires were to be laid. We cleaned out the bones from the buried to get an idea of what the graves looked like.”
“All of a sudden three silver coins appeared!” she added. “We soon realized that many more were lying close to the buried person’s left foot.”
Church discovery
The 12th-century grave was discovered in an old church on the island of Visingsö containing a man believed to have been between 20 and 25 at the age of his death.
Fox News reported that the “pieces of metal were produced between 1150 and 1180. . . 170 silver bracteates were found in total. A bracteate is a piece of thin, coin-shaped metal that was used as jewelry. . . What stumped archaeologists is that the coins were found in a Christian grave. It was not a common practice for early medieval Christians to be buried with a hoard of coins.”
The Jönköping County Museum explained in a statement, “The find is very special, partly because there are few similar finds from the time period, partly because some of the coins are completely unknown from before. . . It is rare that finds are made in Christian graves, that custom belongs to prehistoric times and that makes the Visingsö find special. . . Why this man in his 20s brought all these coins to the grave is not yet known. . . The county museum’s archaeologists hope for more clues when they work further with the find.”
The unknown
The Royal Coin Cabinet’s Eeva Jonsson expressed in a statement, “It is a completely sensational find that will change the early medieval coin history in Götaland and shed light on a period that is largely completely unknown.”
The discovery is the latest reminder that there is still so much that scientists and historians do not know.
As the museum stated, the coins found in the grave were “unknown from before.”