Woman accidentally discovers 'unimaginable' 900-year-old treasure whilst on a casual walk
It's the dream of metal detectorists the world over - going out for a nice walk in a meadow before spotting, with the naked eye, something that catches the light. For this sort of find to be not the discarded wrapper of a KitKat, but the top of a hoard of over 2,000 ancient coins almost beggars belief.
Well, that's what's happened in the Czech Republic recently, when a woman found a huge stash of 900-year-old coins - a discovery that "can be compared to winning a million in the jackpot,” according to Filip Velímský, an archaeologist from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.
The cache was stored in a ceramic pot and seems to have been deliberately hidden, but 900 years of cultivation of the land around it had almost entirely broken the pot up, leaving only its base intact.
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The trove comprised a total of just over 2,150 silver coins, and Velímský and his team have a strong theory about both when it was buried, and why: it "was probably placed [there] during the first quarter of the 12th century, at a time of internal political instability. At that time, there were disputes in the country between the members of the Přemysl dynasty about the princely throne of Prague."
This sort of discovery is pretty monumental, and it also entails a lot more work to be done now that it's been found - each coin will now be processed carefully to clean and restore it as much as possible without doing any damage.
Each one will also have to be carefully registered, and there will doubtless be different types of coins and stamps to analyze.
Lenka Mazačová, director of the Czech Silver Museum in Kutná Hora, explained that the list of jobs includes "to also ensure the cleaning of individual coins and possible restoration interventions, their photography for publication and promotional purposes […] including the preparation of a detailed catalogue."
The aim is to be able to display at least a big chunk of the trove to the public sometime in 2025, by which time we'll probably know more about where the coins came from, when they were minted and what trades they might have been used for.
Again, there's already some theorizing going on here: Mazačová explained that the silver in the coins probably wasn't local to the Czech Republic.
"The coins were most likely minted in the Prague mint from silver that was imported to Bohemia at the time," she said.
Best of all, there will be a nice reward for the woman who found the amazing trove - she'll net 10% of the coins' value as a price for her efforts.