Gold Prospecting in Norway: Discovery of 1500-Year-Old Gold Jewelry

Are you a fan of stories about gold prospecting? Then, this story will surely amaze you!

They call it the "beginner's luck" and this time it happened to Erlend Bore, a 51-year-old Norwegian who had purchased his first metal detector only a few weeks earlier as a hobby, certainly not to engage in gold prospecting. With the awkward posture of a novice and a rather approximate technique, this friendly amateur confirmed a golden rule of metal detecting and gold prospecting: experience matters, technique too, but luck often makes the difference.

Erlend's find has been described, without exaggeration, as the "gold discovery of the century" in the history of gold prospecting in Norway. The man, after sweeping an area on the southern island of Rennesoey, near the city of Stavanger, found last August

9 pendants
3 rings
10 gold beads

dating back approximately 1,500 years, a few centuries before the Viking era.

Ole Madsen, director of the archaeological museum at the University of Stavanger, stated that finding "so much gold at the same time is extremely unusual.".

What will happen to this invaluable discovery?

Unfortunately for Erlend, that gold haul of almost a hundred grams, for which he spent his day as a novice practicing gold prospecting innocently, won't make him rich. According to Norwegian law, if particular artifacts are found during a gold prospecting session in Norway, items dating before 1537 and coins older than 1650 are considered "State property" and must be consigned to authorities. The plan, therefore, is to exhibit the artifacts found during the gold prospecting session at the archaeological museum in Stavanger, about 300 kilometers southwest of Oslo.

The jewelry found last August, with distinctive equestrian signs and likely belonging to the aristocracy of the time, date back, as mentioned, to around 500 B.C., the so-called period of Scandinavian migrations.