Showing posts with label coins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coins. Show all posts

Sunday, January 29, 2017

A tremendous wealth of the Vikings was discovered on a small island in the Baltic Sea. The entire Swedish was much poorer

Riches found on the island of Gotland. Credit: Gabriel Hildebrand / The Royal Coin Cabinet























Stratification did increase on the island as time passed, though. Archaeologists have found that, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, silver hoards were distributed throughout Gotland, suggesting that wealth was more or less uniformly shared among the island’s farmers. But around 1050, this pattern shifted. “In the late eleventh century, you start to have fewer hoards overall, but, instead, there are some really massive hoards, usually found along the coast, containing many, many thousands of coins,” says Jonsson. This suggests that trading was increasingly controlled by a small number of coastal merchants.

This stratification accelerated near the end of the Viking Age, around 1140, when Gotland began to mint its own coins, becoming the first authority in the eastern Baltic region to do so. “Gotlandic coins were used on mainland Sweden and in the Baltic countries,” says Majvor Östergren, an archaeologist who has studied the island’s silver hoards. Whereas Gotlanders had valued foreign coins based on their weight alone, these coins, though hastily hammered out into an irregular shape, had a generally accepted value. More than eight million of these early Gotlandic coins are estimated to have been minted between 1140 and 1220, and more than 22,000 have been found, including 11,000 on Gotland alone.


(Nanouschka Myrberg Burström)An example of one of the earliest silver coins minted on Gotland (obverse, left; reverse, right) dates from around 1140.
Gotland is thought to have begun its coinage operation to take advantage of new trading opportunities made possible by strife among feuding groups on mainland Sweden and in western Russia. This allowed Gotland to make direct trading agreements with the Novgorod area of Russia and with powers to the island’s southwest, including Denmark, Frisia, and northern Germany. Gotland’s new coins helped facilitate trade between its Eastern and Western trading partners, and brought added profits to the island’s elite through tolls, fees, and taxes levied on visiting traders. In order to maintain control over trade on the island, it was limited to a single harbor, Visby, which remains the island’s largest town. As a result, the rest of Gotland’s trading harbors, including Fröjel, declined in importance around 1150.

Gotland remained a wealthy island in the medieval period that followed the Viking Age, but, says Carlsson, “Gotlanders stopped putting their silver in the ground. Instead, they built more than 90 stone churches during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” Although many archaeologists believe that the Gotland Vikings stashed their wealth in hoards for safekeeping, 

Carlsson thinks that, just as did the churches that were built later, they served a devotional purpose. In many cases, he argues, hoards do not appear to have been buried in houses but rather atop graves, roads, or borderlands. Indeed, some were barely buried at all because, he argues, others in the community knew not to touch them. “These hoards were not meant to be taken up,

” he says, “because they were meant as a sort of sacrifice to the gods, to ensure a good harvest, good fortune, or a safer life.” 

In light of the scale, sophistication, and success of the Gotland Vikings’ activities, these ritual depositions may have seemed to them a small price to pay.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Archaeology . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Thursday, December 15, 2016

A new treasure has been discovered in Greece it was found in the ruins of an ancient city dating back 2,500 years

A piece of pottery dating to the late 6th century B.C photo: atlasobscura.com
You would think that every single bit of archaeological evidence for ancient life in Greece would have been uncovered by now. But there are still discoveries to be made. A team of archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and the University of Bournemouth in England took a deeper look at a site that had been dismissed as unimportant and found the ruins of an ancient city dating back 2,500 years, reports the Local.The city was located on a hillside near Vlochós, five hours north of Athens


Mysterious lost Greek city photo: DailyMail.co.uk
Part of the ruins there had been previously known, but since this area of Greece was thought to be a backwater in ancient times, this place was thought to be a small settlement of little interest.

To this team, though, “the fact that nobody has ever explored the hill before is a mystery,” said Robin Rönnlund, the Ph.D student who led the fieldwork.


From the air, the walls are visible photo: atlasobscura.com

Since they started exploring the city, the archaeologists have found the city’s walls, gates, and towers, along with pottery and coins, dating as far back as 500 B.C. The team is using ground-penetrating radar to map the city and avoid disturbing the site through excavation. It’s “quite a large city,” says Rönnlund, and could reveal more about ancient life in this overlooked part of Greece—at least about life up until about 300 B.C., when the city looks to have been abandoned.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by AtlasObscura . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

New Anglo-Saxon precious treasure, discovered by archaeologists in England

Photo: The Vintage News 
In  the seventh century, Reswald the son and grandson of Wuffa Tytila east of England and member of Wuffingas Dynasty, began his reign as king of East England , a kingdom known as the heart of Anglo-Saxons.

10 years before his death, Redwald was seen as one of the most powerful kings of the south of the River Humber, gaining bretwalda name, which meant "leader of Britain".

photo: Searoom SF/ Flickr
When the remains of the king were discovered, they were inside the vessel. Besides the remains of the vessel, they were discovered and stunning metal objects, covered by gold and precious stones, a ceremonial helmet, a shield and a sword, and 37 coins. More have been discovered and two glasses of blue glass, two discs of gilded bronze with zoomorphic ornaments, a silver buckle, a button that belonged gold buckle and croissants which were drunk liquid, croissants that were silver.

Suton Hoo is a site where the bodies were found, whose death allegedly occurred through brutal methods. Discover the treasures on this site reveals important details about the precious objects from the pre-Christian, coming from different cultural backgrounds.


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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by The Vintage News . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Unusual discovery on the Japanese island of Okinawa: Roman coins found among the ruins of a medieval castle

Japanese archaeologists announced Wednesday the discovery for the first time within Japan some coins dating from Roman times.

The coins were found in the ruins of a castle subtropical Okinawa island at a distance of ten thousand kilometers from Rome, according to Le Figaro.

"I thought first that it was one cent coins in vuzunarele fallen American soldiers," he told AFP archaeologist Hiroki Miyagi making an allusion to American military bases in Okinawa. "But after you've rinsed with water, I had a shock: coins were much older."

A team of researchers worked three years at the archaeological site of the castle Katsuren. Built in the late thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century and abandoned 200 years later, the castle appearing from 2013 on UNESCO's World Heritage list.

After an X-ray examination on the parts that are similar in size to the currencies of ten cents, they could see Latin and what appeared to be the image of Emperor Constantine I and a soldier equipped with a lance. Other coins discovered dating back to the Ottoman Empire until the early seventeenth century. Archaeologists were perplexed to how these objects have appeared on this remote island in the southern Japanese archipelago.

"Castle was the residence of a feudal lord enrichment through regional trade." Negosturii East Asia from the XIV and XV were using coins round Chinese with a perforation of a square in the middle and is unlikely currencies Western have been used as a means of payment, "said M. Miyagi, who teaches at Okinawa International University." I think they got those coins in southeast China. "

Source: Mediafax