Unburied treasure: a viking hoard found by a Scottish detectorist and its ‘bizarre’ link to South Australia
An Adelaide company made the metal detector used to unearth the Galloway hoard now on display at the South Australian Museum
In AD900, marauding Vikings buried a hoard of treasure – jewellery, gold, silver and more – in Scotland. It wasn’t until 2014 that it was unearthed.
Metal detectorist Derek McLennan was prospecting in a ploughed field near Dumfries and Galloway when he came across the hoard, which turned out to be the most significant Viking-age collection ever found in the UK or Ireland.
The Galloway hoard made its international debut earlier this year in the Treasures of the Viking Age exhibition at the South Australian Museum.
By chance, the very detector McLennan used (a waterproof, all-terrain CTX 3030, for the cognoscenti) was made by an Australian company based in Adelaide, Minelab.
Minelab’s engineering general manager, Mark Lawrie, says it was a “bizarre” and “happy” coincidence, and the museum confirmed it had no relationship with the company.
Minelab sells detectors for coins and treasures, for gold prospecting and for finding landmines in conflict zones. With names such as Excalibor, Equinox and Manticore, the machines have helped customers around the world find treasures such as a pirate knife, sterling silver with an ivory handle and a Bronze-age torc. There are coins and rings, and American civil war relics, arrowheads and, in one case, a 1906 dog registration tag.
And then there was that amazing cache in Scotland.
“I unearthed the first piece; initially I didn’t understand what I had found because I thought it was a silver spoon, and then I turned it over and wiped my thumb across it and I saw the saltire-type of design and knew instantly it was Viking. Then my senses exploded,” McLennan said at the time.
In Scotland, treasure seekers are paid for their finds – in this case, National Museums Scotland paid Derek McLennan a reward of almost £2m (about A$4m) for the 5kg of gold, silver, textiles and other objects he found.
When he discovered it, the hoard of treasure was topped with a layer of silver bullion with an Anglo-Saxon cross, thought to be a decoy. Under it was another layer – of gravel – under which was a much larger stash of silver bullion, then elaborate, silver arm-rings and a box of gold objects, including a gold bird-pin. Next was a silver-gilt vessel, packed with valuables and wrapped in fabric, and inscribed with a “fire-altar” associated with Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the last Persian imperial dynasty, in modern-day Iran.
The Vikings buried their loot as they fled danger, perhaps hoping to later recover it – or to see it in the afterlife.
Content coordinator at the SA Museum, Stephen Zagala, says apart from the looted treasures in the hoard, there are other objects that are perhaps more interesting.
“It’s these glass beads and curios and heirlooms which are really more like a time capsule than a treasure hoard,” he says. “Heirlooms that have been passed down over several generations, and they intended to pass them on further, and it never happened.
“They were just left in the ground for a thousand years.”
One of his favourite objects is the rattle-stone, also known as a charm-stone.
“The inside has been eroded by water and left some sort of little fossil or other bit of stone inside, so that it rattles when you shake it like a seed pod,” he says.
Zagala explains that the rattle-stone was often used in Scandinavia to help “loosen” a baby during childbirth.
“It speaks to magic and mysticism,” he says. “It speaks to maternal care and memories and relationships in a community.”
Mark Lawrie says Minelab started working with McLennan and his wife, Sharon – who is from Kalgoorlie – after their 2014 find. They are now field testers who help Minelab fine-tune its technology. They are testing, for example, technology to weed coke – which sends similar signals as metals do – from burned wood in Scotland, to be used for energy.
While detectorists hunt for archaeological treasure and Viking hoards in Europe, in Australia it’s more about looking for gold, old coins or lost objects.
Australia’s famous gold nuggets are one of the reasons Minelab is in Australia. Another is that an inventor in the 1990s worked out how to get detectors to work on the iron-heavy red dirt of the outback.
Now, Lawrie says, they have a big market in Africa. There, people on the poverty line can make a living out of finding gold.
Minelab also makes landmine detectors for humanitarian projects in Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan and Ukraine, “everywhere where there has been conflict,” he says.
Lawrie is a detectorist himself and describes it as “meditative”.
“If you like hunting, or fishing, anything to do with dreaming of the thing you’re going to get, and then preparing all your equipment and then going and doing it and, by and large, not actually finding anything most of the time, but being OK with that … that’s very similar,” he says.
“They sometimes call it ‘dirt fishing’.”
Researchers will be studying the Galloway hoard for years, if not decades to come, particularly the more exotic items: the surviving silk, those curios, a rock crystal jar.
And there are two balls of compact earth containing flecks of gold, which might have been gathered from a religious shrine or sacred place. But for now they’re calling these things, which McLennan fished out of the earth, “dirt balls”.
• Treasures of the Viking Age: the Galloway Hoard is at the South Australian Museum until 27 July.