When a pair of brothers in Norway found a stash of ancient loot hidden under a church, they scooped up the treasures — but didn’t tell anyone about them for 60 years.
Archaeologists who have now had the chance to study the finds say the children discovered remarkably rare artifacts from a burial mound dating back centuries, including coins minted by a Medieval king, Knewz.com has learned.
“We were just children on a treasure hunt under the church, we didn’t realize how rare the coins were,” Jan Gunnar, one of the curious kids, said decades later, according to a press release on Wednesday, March 6, from the Møre og Romsdal County Municipality, when translated from Norwegian to English.
In 1964, the boys crawled underneath the floor of the Edøy Church in the Smøla municipality and entered into a space that was likely the site of a burial mound dating back to the Middle Ages, between 1200 and 1300 A.D., the release said.
In one corner, Gunnar unearthed a silver coin, then another, and eventually 14 of them. He and his brother also found an amber pearl and nine needles in the crawl space, which had been hollowed out by Germans to store ammunition during a war.
Gunnar collected the artifacts into a yellow Kodak slide box and stashed them away, where they sat until the fall of 2023 when he told County Archaeologist Carl Fredrik Wahr-Handsen Vemmestad the story of his childhood treasure hunt.
Vemmestad soon learned some of the coins, marked with a crown head, dated back to the first half of the 14th century, when Magnus Lagabøte ruled Norway.
The stash also included one coin from between 1450 and 1481 produced under the reign of King Christian the 1st, an ancestor of modern-day Norwegian and Danish royalty, according to the release.
Experts said the needles were likely from the clothing of the corpse in the burial mound, and the amber bead may have been an accessory from a prayer wreath.
“The find is incredibly rare,” the county said in the translated statement, quoting Vemmestad. “Elsewhere in Central Norway, there are literally only a handful of such coins that have survived to our time. The coins give a unique insight into the Middle Ages on Edøy.”
Norway’s Cultural Heritage Act dictates that all coins predating 1650 that were not privately owned before 1905 legally belong to the state.
“We are very happy that Jan Gunnar let us take over these coins, so that they can be preserved in a safe way and secured for the future,” Vemmestad said.
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Author: Marissa Papanek
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