Forty years after her father rescued them, a woman found 32 identical iron ingots that the Vikings may have used as currency. An image of an iron hoard of 1,000-year-old bars grouped in bundles. A 1,000-year-old rare ironworks that languished in a family’s basement for 40 years in Norway is now on its way after a woman discovers the treasure during spring cleaning.

The stack consists of 32 iron ingots that look like small spatulas and date to the Viking Age (793-1066 AD) or the High Middle Ages (1066-1350 AD). The sticks are identical and weigh about 1.8 ounces (50 grams) each, leading archaeologists to speculate that they may have been used as a form of currency and that someone probably buried them with the intention of returning them for treasure later on.

“We call it caching because someone’s [закопав це]Ketil Loftsgarden, an archaeologist and associate professor at the University of Oslo and the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, told NRK News. Experts added that each ingot was pierced with a hole at one end, suggesting that the ingots may have been tied together in a bundle.

Loftsgarden said that while similar metal artifacts are already in the museum’s collections, the discovery is rare as construction projects often destroy or damage buried treasures. In this case, Grete Margo Sorgum, who came across the treasure trove while cleaning out her family’s basement in Valdres, central Norway, told NRK News that her father remembers finding the treasure while digging a well near the house in the 1980s. “But then he cornered them,” Sørum said.

According to NRK News, the last time someone uncovered an iron ingot treasure in Valdres was 100 years ago.

From the late Viking Age to the High Middle Ages, independent farmers in southern Norway produced iron on a large scale, according to a 2019 Loftsgarden study published in the Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, Fornvännen. The region was so fertile that there was a surplus of iron that traders sold to elites in Norway’s more populated coastal areas.

Sjörum’s father unearthed the ingots in an area on Bergen’s Royal Road known as Kongevegen, which served as a trade route between Oslo and Bergen 1,000 years ago. According to Loftsgarden’s work, the area around the site was filled with coal mines indispensable for the production of iron for smelting in the Viking and Middle Ages.

Sørum informed the Valdres Folk Museum in Fagernes, who in turn forwarded the iron collection to the cultural heritage department of Inlandet County Council. The iron hoard is now stored at the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, where archaeologists will examine and catalog the artifacts.

“Ancient finds delivered to archaeologists provide new perspectives on the history of the Inner Continent,” said Anne Engesven, Head of Archeology at the Cultural Heritage Department.

The discovery of an iron collection in the Sørum family’s basement isn’t the first Vikings have found in Norway in recent months. In November 2022, a metal detector stumbled upon a Viking treasure consisting of what appeared to be a pair of silver rings, pieces of a silver bracelet, and crushed Arabian coins, among other buried artifacts.