The Spillings Hoard

In July 1999 a Swedish television crew came to a field at Spillings, a farm in Othem parish on the north-east coast of Gotland, to film a short piece about the looting of archaeological sites. The farmer had reported coins from the field the previous autumn, and an archaeologist and a numismatist were on hand. The filming turned up a few lumps of melted bronze. About twenty minutes after the crew drove away, the detector gave a strong signal, and by the end of the day two silver deposits lay exposed about three metres apart. On the larger one, by the archaeologist's own account, the machine simply showed 'overload' and switched itself off.

Gotlands Museum chose to announce the find at once rather than keep it quiet, and posted guards while the deposits were excavated. The silver was too fragile to pick out by hand, so the lower parts were cased in plaster and lifted as blocks. They proved to weigh about 27 kg and 40 kg. A third cache, of bronze, was traced a few days later and lifted the following year. One deposit had been clipped by the plough, and a former owner of the land remembered throwing away 'steel wire' from the same spot years before, so the original total was larger still.

The numbers are hard to take in. Together the two silver deposits held 14,295 coins and close to 500 arm-rings, along with bars, coiled wire, finger-rings, neck-rings and chopped silver. For comparison, the Swedish History Museum notes that an ordinary Gotland silver hoard weighs 200 to 300 grams, and that the previous Swedish record, from Burge in Lummelunda, was about 10.4 kg. Many arm-rings are of the stamped Gotlandic type, weighing around 100 grams each, and were threaded together in bunches that seem to match Viking-age weight units. A few are of kinds more at home in Norway or the British Isles, and some plain rings resemble the 'ring money' of Finland and Britain.

Almost all the coins are dirhams from the Islamic world, struck at dozens of mints between Central Asia and North Africa. The oldest is a Sasanian Persian piece of 539; the youngest that has been identified dates to 870. Many coins and rings carry small nicks where someone tested the metal under the surface. Among the dirhams are contemporary imitations made of good silver, and one coin struck by the Khazars of the lower Volga that replaces the usual Muslim creed with 'Moses is the messenger of God'.

Excavations in 2000 and again in 2003 to 2006 showed that the three caches had lain beneath the floor of a wooden building with no hearth: a storehouse or outbuilding rather than a home. Traces of wood, iron fittings and a lock show the bronze, at least, had been kept in a chest. The bronze itself, broken neck-rings, bangles, pins and drinking-horn mounts, is mostly of East Baltic type and looks like stock gathered for recasting.

Who owned all this is unknown. The farm lay close to one of Gotland's best natural harbours, and Gotlanders sat on the routes that carried Arab silver from Russian rivers into the Baltic. The hoard is best read as the stored wealth of a household that did very well out of that traffic, buried and never recovered. Its scale has made it a reference collection for studying how silver moved and was valued in the ninth century.