Emily Chan
In southwestern Norway, four silver bracelets from the Viking Age were buried nearly eight inches in the ground. They were located on a mountainside in a village called Årdal.
The bracelets date back to around the ninth century and had lain untouched for over 1,000 years, still in the exact spot where they had originally been buried.
“This is definitely the biggest thing I have experienced in my career,” said Volker Demuth, an archaeologist and project manager with the Archaeological Museum at the University of Stavanger.
They were found in advance of construction work of a new tractor road for a local farmer named Tårn Sigve Schmidt.
Some of the jewelry had twisted designs, so researchers thought they were copper wires at first. Twisted copper wires were commonly found on agricultural lands.
However, further exploration revealed that the artifacts were silver. The site of the bracelets was once a Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) farm that consisted of numerous houses for people and animals.
The bracelets were unearthed within one of the smaller structures, which likely housed enslaved people.
The “large and powerful” farm showed signs of being burned down, coinciding with a time of great turmoil in the Viking Age.
According to Demuth, the burial of the bracelets makes sense when considering the fact that the people who lived on the farm may have had to flee from an attack.
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