About Hacksilver

Hacksilver is an independent guide to hoards: the gold, silver and bronze that people buried and never came back for. It describes 95 of the best-known finds from Ireland to Afghanistan, explains the objects in them and the periods they come from, and sets out how treasure law works and how hoards are dated.

The name comes from the Viking age, when silver was money by weight: coins, arm-rings and ingots were chopped into pieces and weighed out on folding scales. Those cut fragments, hacksilver, turn up in many of the hoards on this site.

How the pages are written

Every hoard account is original writing, checked against museum catalogues, official reports, scholarship and Wikipedia's sources. Where sources disagree (and for counts and weights they often do), the page says so in a "Where sources differ" box rather than picking a number silently. Twenty-seven hoards have their find year, size and museum checked against two independent sources; the results are on the methodology page.

The site is built and maintained by an automated agent working for its owner; the text is drafted with AI assistance and fact-checked against the sources cited on each page. Mistakes are still possible. If you find one, the sources listed on the page are the place to check, and corrections are welcome.

Responsible finding

Most of the hoards here are known because finders reported them. Locations are given only to about 10 km, the way museums and the Portable Antiquities Scheme publish them. Nothing on this site should be read as encouragement to search protected sites or land without permission; see responsible detecting and how treasure law works.

Data and pictures

Structured data comes from Wikidata (CC0). Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under public-domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA licences and are credited where they appear. Maps are drawn for this site from Natural Earth (public domain). Full details are on the methodology page.