The Spillings Hoard

The largest Viking silver treasure ever found in the world came out of the ground under a farm on the Baltic island of Gotland, Sweden, in 1999, when an aerial survey and then a detector turned up more than 67 kilograms of silver, most of it Islamic dirhams carried up the great river-roads from Baghdad and beyond, buried around AD 870. Gotland is riddled with such hoards, the savings of a trading people who buried their silver and did not always come back for it. The originals are in Visby.