Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge
42 comments
·June 18, 2025countrymile
For anyone who hasn't seen the detectorists, it gives a very British perspective on this sort of work, and is one of the best British comedies of the last ten years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detectorists
louky
So does Time Team, and they're back making new episodes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpbubYLW2fdf9ySyCS0f...
atombender
Agreed, it's fantastic. It's not just a brilliant and warm comedy, it's also apparently a really accurate and well-researched depiction of the metal detecting world.
4ndrewl
The British perspective on this is really the Portable Antquities Scheme at https://finds.org.uk/ which has been running for over 20 years.
You'll find details of research papers and the Staffordshire Hoard, probably one of the largest collections of Anglo-Saxon metalwork ever found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard
jvm___
Detectorist was the perfect "the world is a normal place" show during the early days of the pandemic.
BurningFrog
Impressed that people turned in "1.5 kilograms of Viking Age gold artifacts".
That gold is worth about $160k!
If I ran the program I would pay at least the metal value to anyone turning artifacts in. To remove the temptation that doubtless keeps some finds away from the science.
olalonde
If I understand correctly, they were paid $150k for it.
> Aagaard, Dreiøe and their friend the late Poul Nørgaard Pedersen discovered nearly 1.5 kilograms of Viking Age gold artifacts near the modern town of Fæsted, including armbands that archaeologists have interpreted as oath bands [...] Aagaard, Dreiøe and Nørgaard received just over a million kroner for the oath ring treasure, the equivalent of about $150,000.
ambentzen
How would law abiding citizen Joe Random from Nowhere even know where to offload that on the black market?
It's a bit like internet piracy, make it easy and convenient to follow the law and most people will do it.
BurningFrog
Can't say I've tried, but I think it's pretty easy to find buyers for gold.
Melting it removes the legal risk.
dwattttt
Melting it removes _a_ legal risk. I'm sure if someone looks they can find a risk or two still there somewhere.
thrance
You'd be surprised of how easy it is for "Joe Random from Nowhere" to sell their illegaly sourced priceless artefacts. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_Treasure
tokai
The budget to pay for these finds is regularly exceeded already. Paying the gold price would fleece the National Museum.
BurningFrog
Understood. But it's also true that you get what you pay for.
tokai
In this case it bought the most productive amateur archeology community in Europe :)
jopsen
Getting a cut is probably better.
Spending gold you can't document the origin of is most decidedly going to be a hassle. Certainly not without risk. And you probably don't have money laundering connections.
And you'll sleep better at night.
fudgybiscuits
Whether that's good or not really does depend on how much gold was found though, could be that 10kg was kept for all we know!
southernplaces7
>could be that 10kg was kept for all we know!
Doubtful. Finding such a hoard and reporting it to the authorities for formal examination by default means showing where you found it so the site itself can be examined by archaeologists. They'd likely be able to tell if you'd found more than you reported in the cache site. It's like forensics, but for ancient artefacts and ruins, pretty sophisticated at times.
colechristensen
Once properly documented, I have some skepticism that it's really necessary to hold every historical artifact found, inside some museum archive basically never to be seen again.
southernplaces7
What else should be done with the artifacts? And also why not? It's like storing your data. If you can keep it relatively inexpensive, why not keep it around just in case some future need or curiosity makes it worthwhile?
AlotOfReading
It isn't, but it's impossible to know what will be useful for research again in the future, so historical researchers make an effort to preserve what they can and avoid excavating if possible.
BurningFrog
You can probably do a detailed 3d scan and retain 95% of the scientific value.
heikkilevanto
No, at some point they want to analyze the impurities in the gold, or the isotopes, or something else we don't know yet...
delusional
I'm pretty sure more than 5% of the scientific value is in the actual physical material. You can't examine the physics of the thing from a 3d scan.
biophysboy
Denmark has a fantastic maritime museum right by the Kronborg castle with hundreds of model ships, wreckage artifacts and high-quality underwater photos. Would recommend visiting on a Copenhagen trip
roger_
Do the detectorists get a certificate or something for their honesty?
tokai
They get a payment and they get to be a part of the archaeological process. I have a colleague that had a significant find recently. Her and her "crew" did the dig, cleaning, initial description and cataloguing, and surveyed the area around the site. With supervision from professional archaeologists. Without this system they would get to handover any finds to the landowner.
trhway
how about hanging metal detector from a drone or just plain autonomous RC car. I think once such massive de-mining starts in Ukraine, the tech would trickle down into archaeology and the like fields.
wewewedxfgdf
"The swastika design next to the man's head predates the adoption of this symbol by the Nazis."
1,500 years ago!
thaumasiotes
> Ginnerup dug up 14 glittering gold disks—some as big as saucers—that archaeologists say were buried about 1,500 years ago
> the real showstopper is an amulet called a bracteate with two stylized designs: a man in profile, his long hair pulled back in a braid, and a horse in full gallop. An expert in ancient runes says she was awestruck when she finally made out the inscription on top: “He is Odin’s man.”
> These embossed runes are the oldest known written mention of Odin, the Norse god of war and ruler of Valhalla. Ginnerup’s bracteate, which archaeologists describe as the most significant Danish find in centuries, extended the worship of Odin back 150 years
I don't think this is right. The first mention of Odin by a Germanic source could date to 500 AD. But the Romans wrote about the Germanic gods several centuries prior to that. They used the equivalence we still use today, calling Odin "Mercury". But what they say about the Germanic gods is compatible with what we know from Germanic sources; there's no reason to believe there was a change in the gods.
I note that the image on the bracteate features a pretty prominent swastika. Maybe Hitler was accidentally on to something after all.
ethan_smith
Roman accounts using interpretatio romana (equating Germanic deities with Roman gods) aren't the same as direct written evidence naming "Odin" specifically. The bracteate's significance is that it contains the actual name in runic form, not a Roman interpretation or equivalent.
thaumasiotes
Sure, but claiming that it pushes back the date of Odin's worship back 150 years is wrong. It hasn't made any change to our beliefs about when Odin was worshiped, or where, or by whom.
tokai
It's the oldest mention of Odin in Denmark. The sciam journalist lost that detail somewhere. That is why the find pushed worship of Odin in Denmark back 150 years.
null
eesmith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin#Roman_era_to_Migration_Pe... says "The earliest clear reference to Odin by name is found on a C-bracteate discovered in Denmark in 2020."
So, "written mention of Odin" seems to mean written as "Odin', and not as "Mercury".
It also mentions some debate over if the Goths actually worshiped Odin/Mercury, but I am too ill-informed to make sense if that's relevant.
I did manage to find a scholarly reference to the topic at https://helda.helsinki.fi/server/api/core/bitstreams/c11e69e... ("Pre-print papers of THE 18TH INTERNATIONAL SAGA CONFERENCE SAGAS AND THE CIRCUM-BALTIC ARENA. Helsinki and Tallinn, 7th–14th August 2022")
> The problem of Mercury
> Despite lack of Germanic evidence for the existence of a cult of Wodan/Óðinn before the fifth (or perhaps even the sixth) century, as presented above, many scholars maintain ancient roots. For example, disregarding critical scholarship on various individual sources, Schjødt reiterated that “taken together, they strongly indicate that Óðinn, although not exactly the same as the god that we know from the Nordic sources, has roots reaching far back in time, probably as early as the Indo-European era (at least 3000 BC)” (Schjødt 2019: 67). ...
> The reading of interpretation romana maintains that Tacitus’ famous description of Germanic deities, Deorum maxime Mercurium colunt, should be understood to signify Wodan/Óðinn. Of course, it has already been shown by Karl Helm that this was a historical trope copied from Herodotus, and/or Caesar’s Commentarii de bello gallico (Helm 1946: 7-12). The fact that Caesar was talking about Celts, and his description of religion among the Germani mentions worship of the sun, moon, and fire, does nothing to secure the reliability of such ‘historical’ sources. Either way, the argument that the foremost deity interpreted by Tacitus as a ‘Mercury-type’ must be Wodan/Óðinn is a projection of the latter’s supremacy in Old Norse material onto a Germanic society several centuries older. This becomes a circular argument and cannot be leading.
thaumasiotes
Tacitus isn't the only interpretation of the Germanic gods. He is thought to refer to Thor as Hercules, but there are other references where a Jupiter is mentioned. There is a Roman complaint that the Germanic peoples see Mercury as the father of Jupiter when it should be the other way around.
And while it's possible, it would be extremely surprising for Odin to be a new addition to the Germanic pantheon when we find him attested under that name in the 5th/6th century. He's in charge of the whole thing! The norm is for gods - all gods - to have very deep roots. Where we can prove that a god is novel, we can also often show that it's a borrowing of a foreign god with deeper roots (e.g. Adonis < Tammuz) or that it is an explicit deification of a human (e.g. if you go to the temple of the city god in Shanghai, there's an informative plaque explaining that the city god was posthumously appointed to the position by an emperor of the Yuan dynasty).
I do understand that after cassava or maize was introduced somewhere in Africa, anthropologists documented a new goddess associated with the crop. Innovation exists. But pantheons are very conservative overall. "Several centuries" is not an amount of time where we expect to see pantheonic turnover.
I live in Switzerland and I know an ancient forest where I go every year and pull out about 20kg of chanterelle and 10kg of toten trumpeten. These mushrooms come back every year, potentially for thousands of years.
One year I found a big piece of a clay cooking pan in the area where the chanterelles grow.
There are also tons of ravines, potential caves but I won't know until I climb down the ravines, but about 20 km away there are tourist caves where you can pay to enter them, part of the same ridge system.
I wanted to see if I could use a metal detector to find treasure, like in the article but it's illegal here. I suppose I could go in at night with the equipment but it's probably not worth it since while the Roman's were very active in Switzerland they weren't in this very specific region.
But still, where did the clay cooking pan come from?