Finland's largest Viking Age silver hoard turned up in two birch-bark parcels near Sysmä

Esko Tikkala, the archaeologist at the Lahti Historical Museum who excavated the find, separated two dates that are easy to collapse into one. The coins and jewelry likely date to between AD 1000 and 1050, he told Live Science in an email, and exactly when the silver went into the ground is unknown ^[3]. The loosest element of the chronology is the dirhams, the Islamic-world silver coins mixed in with issues from present-day Germany, Sweden and Great Britain ^[13]. Dirhams previously found in Finland generally date to between about 800 and 1050, Tikkala said ^[14]. Specialists in Viking Age coins will try to identify the individual coins and prepare a detailed report ^[21]. The top of the likely minting window falls 16 years short of 1066, the Stamford Bridge date conventionally used to close the period ^[3].

Why anyone buried it is the question the metal cannot answer by itself. Live Science reached for a recent study of more than 15,000 Roman-era hoards, which found they were hidden for several reasons, including tax evasion, votive offerings and safe storage in times of uncertainty ^[10]. That study covers the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD ^[10]. The thing it does not tell you is which of those reasons put two birch-bark parcels into Finnish forest soil a thousand years later. Tikkala said there were no signs of any burials nearby ^[12].

Finland's previous record hoard was found in 1895 at Nousiainen, about 210 km southwest of Sysmä; it held more than 1,700 silver coins and weighed about half as much as the new find ^[23], which puts it near 2.25 kg ^[1]. Two other Nordic countries reported their own record hoards this past spring: more than 4,700 coins in Norway, and more than 700 silver objects weighing over 18.5 kg in a Danish homeowner's backyard ^[24]. The Danish hoard is roughly four times the weight of the Finnish one ^[2]. The silver in the Sysmä hoard alone would be worth almost $10,000 today ^[16].

Tikkala was direct about the label attached to all of this. "The term Viking Age does not imply that there were Vikings in Finland," he said ^[18]. "We have no sources suggesting that Finland was 'Viking' in the same sense as regions of present-day Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" ^[19]. Finnish historians and archaeologists adopted the term to designate the period, and the area now known as Finland was not culturally or politically part of Viking Scandinavia ^[20].

None of the material has been fully cleaned, separated or counted ^[4]. "There are quite a lot of coins in this hoard," Tikkala said ^[5]. "I have not had time to go through them" ^[6]. He expects publication either way: "There will definitely be scientific articles published on the hoard as a whole, as well as more detailed studies of the coins themselves," he said ^[22].