Ancient finds amazed archaeologists in this region of the country
Small gold jewelry belonged to a man who had power during the Merovingian times. Thanks to a weak sound signal in a metal detector, gold bars were discovered for the first time in eastern Norway.
Photo: unsplash.com
The metal detector signal was so weak that Mikkel Killingmo Christensen almost missed it. But he discovered tiny gold nuggets.
«When I looked at the metal foil more closely, I could see two figures and gradually realized that I was standing with a golden old man in my hands. Imagine that I am the first person to do something like this in over a thousand years!» the man says.
Christensen snapped a few photos before quickly packing up his find. Previously, archaeologists knew the description of an object that may have been a die for making gold nuggets from Ostfold. But this is the first time anyone has actually found a gold nugget in the area.
The fact is that researchers do not know exactly what the small decorated pieces of gold with the strange name “gold nuggets” were actually used for. They date from the Merovingian era, starting in 550 and ending in the Viking era. Many of them were found in Denmark, quite a few in Sweden and not so much in Norway. They are often found in connection with ritual structures, and the main theory suggests that they were used for some kind of ritual.
The largest collection of this type of finds in Norway is in Hove, in Vingrom. After excavations in the summer of 2023, the collection increased by five gold nuggets. A total of 35 gold nuggets were found at this site.
Since the early 1700s, gold nuggets have been found in approximately 10–11 different locations in Norway. Most often, only one or two pieces of gold are found in the same place.
“This is an unusual find,” says Igunn Marit Rostad, an archaeologist at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. She said the two men depicted wearing gold jewelry look “quintessentially Norwegian.”
“The man is wearing a cloak with a slit, with two strands of hair sticking out from the front and back. It is also found in Denmark, but is most common in Norway. There are common features in the woman’s hairstyle and in the way she is depicted that make this drawing similar to the images,” says the archaeologist.
Gold bars were found on a farm in Fredrikstad, where Mikkel Killingmo Christensen and his father Terje Christensen has spent many hours over the past two or three years.
Judging from the known cultural monuments in the surrounding area, it is likely that the square was associated with a seat of power in the Iron Age.
“Obviously , that there was a lot of traffic here in the Merovingian era,” says district archaeologist Arild Lunde Teigen from the Department of Cultural Heritage in Ostfold. But he is not sure that this is where even more gold nuggets can be found.