Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderArchaeology fact

In 2009 amateur metal detectorist Terry Herbert found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered, in a farmer's field in Staffordshire, England: over 3,500 pieces, almost all of them fittings stripped from weapons and war gear.

Staffordshire, 2009

HistoryArchaeology

The story behind the card

Herbert had been detecting for 18 years with little to show for it when, on 5 July 2009, farmer Fred Johnson let him search a freshly ploughed field near Hammerwich. Over the next five days he kept finding gold: sword hilt fittings, helmet pieces and gold work set with thousands of garnets, cut and fitted with great skill. One gold strip is inscribed with a Latin verse from the Bible's Book of Numbers asking God to scatter his enemies. The hoard, most of it made in the 7th century, was valued at £3.285 million, shared equally by Herbert and Johnson under English treasure law, and bought by museums in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent. Who buried it, and why, is unknown.

Türkçe oku
Amatör dedektörcü Terry Herbert, 2009'da İngiltere'nin Staffordshire bölgesinde bir tarlada şimdiye kadar bulunmuş en büyük Anglosakson altın hazinesine rastladı. 3.500'ü aşkın parçanın neredeyse tamamı, silahlardan ve savaş teçhizatından sökülmüş süslemelerdi.
Staffordshire, 2009

Herbert 18 yıldır dedektörle arıyor, pek bir şey bulamıyordu. 5 Temmuz 2009'da çiftçi Fred Johnson, Hammerwich yakınlarında yeni sürülmüş tarlasında arama yapmasına izin verdi. Sonraki beş gün boyunca toprak altın vermeyi sürdürdü: kılıç kabzası süsleri, miğfer parçaları ve büyük ustalıkla kesilip yerleştirilmiş binlerce grena taşıyla bezeli altın işler. Altın bir şeridin üzerinde, Eski Ahit'teki Sayılar kitabından alınmış ve Tanrı'dan düşmanlarını dağıtmasını dileyen Latince bir ayet yazılı. Çoğu 7. yüzyılda yapılmış hazineye 3,285 milyon sterlin değer biçildi. Bu para İngiliz define yasası gereği Herbert ile Johnson arasında eşit paylaşıldı; hazineyi Birmingham ve Stoke-on-Trent'teki müzeler satın aldı. Hazineyi kimin, neden gömdüğü bilinmiyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Staffordshire Hoard
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

Angkor hydraulic systemRead card
WonderTrade

The Incense Route carried frankincense and myrrh, fragrant tree resins, from southern Arabia to Mediterranean markets for centuries, through a chain of caravan towns, wells, forts and water systems across the desert.

Frankincense and myrrh come from trees that grow in the dry lands of southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. They were burned in temples and homes, and used in medicine, perfume and embalming. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around AD 77, says the road from Thomna in southern Arabia to Gaza on the Mediterranean was divided into 65 camel stages, and that by the coast each camel-load had cost 688 denarii in water, fodder, lodging, tolls and payments to priests, guards and officials. Cities that controlled parts of the route grew rich, among them Shabwa in Yemen and the Nabataean capital Petra in today's Jordan, whose cisterns and dams stored scarce rain for the caravans.

Incense RouteRead card
WonderArchaeology

Blombos Cave, on South Africa's southern coast, has yielded a 100,000-year-old kit for mixing ochre, a red earth pigment, as well as later shell beads and pieces of ochre engraved with patterns: early signs of planning and symbolic thought.

The cave lies in a coastal cliff about 300 kilometres east of Cape Town and has been excavated since 1991 by a team led by the archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood. In 2011 the team reported two abalone shells used as containers about 100,000 years ago: people had ground ochre and mixed it with crushed bone, charcoal and other ingredients to make a pigment paste, a recipe that needs several planned steps. Layers from about 75,000 years ago hold pierced beads made from small snail shells, once strung and worn, and pieces of ochre engraved with cross-hatched lines. In 2018 the team described a small stone flake with a cross-hatched pattern drawn in ochre crayon, about 73,000 years old, the oldest drawing known anywhere.

Blombos CaveRead card
WonderArchaeology

The Schöningen spears, found in a German coal mine in the 1990s, are among the oldest known hunting weapons: wooden spears shaped and balanced for throwing. Their exact age, once put at about 400,000 years, is still debated.

A team led by the archaeologist Hartmut Thieme uncovered ten wooden weapons between 1994 and 1999 in an open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, where waterlogged lakeside mud kept the wood from rotting. Most were carved from spruce trunks, one from pine, and in some the thickest point lies in the front third of the shaft, as on a modern javelin. When athletes threw replicas, they reached targets 15 to 20 metres away. The spears lay among the bones of an extinct wild horse, many with butchery marks. Their age has changed with each dating method: first 380,000 to 400,000 years, then about 300,000 to 337,000; a 2025 study argued for about 200,000 years, which would make Neanderthals their likely makers.

Schöningen spearsRead card
WonderArchitecture

Great Zimbabwe, the stone city built by ancestors of the Shona people between the 11th and 15th centuries, has huge granite walls laid without mortar. It was the capital of a kingdom that traded gold towards the Indian Ocean coast.

The ruins spread over several square kilometres in the south-east of today's Zimbabwe, and at its height the city was probably home to up to 10,000 people. Its best-known structure, the Great Enclosure, has walls up to 11 metres high, some topped with chevrons, a zigzag pattern of set stones. Excavations found Chinese pottery, glass beads, coins from Arabia and a coin minted at Kilwa on the Swahili coast, signs of the city's place in Indian Ocean trade. Colonial writers claimed Africans could not have built it. David Randall-MacIver in 1905 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 showed it was the work of the Shona's ancestors, yet Rhodesia's government kept promoting other theories until independence in 1980. Dzimbabwe means houses of stone in Shona, and the country took its name from the city.

Great ZimbabweRead card
Next card in the archiveOn 30 June 1908 a space rock, probably a stony asteroid 50 to 60 metres wide, exploded in the air above the Tunguska region of Siberia and flattened about 2,000 square kilometres of forest. No impact crater has ever been found.Read next →