A Finnish Metal Detectorist Was Shocked to Unearth a Trove of Viking Age Silver in His Hometown. Then His Detector Went Off Again

A metal detectorist in southern Finland has unearthed the country’s largest hoard of Late Iron Age silver coins to date. Buried in the 11th century in what’s now the town of Sysmä, the ten-pound collection contains remnants of jewelry and likely thousands of coins. The detectorist, Kalle Lappinen, was scanning ground in his hometown last week when his metal detector signaled.

He began digging, and then his handheld probe “roared,” Lappinen tells the New York Times’ Ephrat Livni. He found “a pile of coins” about 18 inches down and, once he had “recovered from the adrenaline rush,” reported it to authorities. Then, not far away, Lappinen’s metal detector signaled again, prompting him to dig a second hole—and find yet another trove of coins.

The next day, Esko Tikkala, an archaeologist at the nearby Lahti City Museums, arrived to inspect and excavate the artifacts. According to a statement from the museums, the collection includes a fragment of hacksilver, a silver bracelet, a silver charm, a silver bead and many silver coins—which have not yet been cleaned, separated or counted. The coins alone weigh just under ten pounds; experts say there must be thousands.

This half-century corresponds with the tail end of the Viking Age, which historians typically confine to about 793 C.E.—when Vikings raided Lindisfarne in Britain—through 1066, the date of the Norman Conquest. Lahti City Museums have thus classified the hoard as a “Viking Age” find. As Toni Paukku, an archaeologist at the Lahti Museums, tells the Times, “Finland was strongly connected to the Scandinavian cultural sphere, boosted by the trade of Scandinavian seafarers—some of whom were indeed Vikings—across the Baltic Sea.” The silver hoard found by Lappinen was buried in two birch-bark containers, about 40 feet apart, per the statement.

Experts don’t know why it was buried, but historians do know that the close of the Viking Age was an unstable period in Finland, as Swedes and Danes raided its regions where Finns, Russians and Germans traded. Just over a week ago, a Dane landscaping in his backyard accidentally unearthed Denmark’s largest hoard of Viking silver, and in April, metal detectorists in Norway found their country’s largest deposit of Viking silver. The Sysmä collection has easily taken the title of Finland’s largest silver coin hoard, which previously belonged to a five-pound stash unearthed near the southern coast in 1895.

The Sysmä discovery is “a case of responsible and responsive detecting, which has produced a promising archaeological discovery,” Eljas Oksanen, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, tells the Times. It shows that “detectorists can produce a considerable amount of new valuable information about the past, not the least because they (as in this case) search in areas that professional archaeologists do not go to.” Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.