Updated

Updated · Fox News · Nov 1

Archaeologists Unearth 45 Roman Silver Coins at Swedish Base, Finding a Gold Ring and 2 Counterfeits

Updated

Updated · Fox News · Nov 1

Archaeologists Unearth 45 Roman Silver Coins at Swedish Base, Finding a Gold Ring and 2 Counterfeits

Q: What mysterious climate disaster in the sixth century forced wealthy Swedish farmers to abandon their hidden gold and silver?

The likely culprit was the **volcanic winter that began in A.D. 536**, a severe climate shock triggered by major volcanic eruptions that darkened the skies, cooled temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere, and helped cause repeated harvest failures. That disaster is widely linked to what historians and climate scientists call the **Late Antique Little Ice Age**. Contemporary writers described the sun as dim and weak, while tree-ring and ice-core evidence points to a sharp drop in temperatures after sulfate aerosols spread through the atmosphere. Summers in Europe may have cooled by around 2.5 to 2.7 degrees Celsius, with further eruptions in 539–540 and possibly 547 extending the crisis. For Scandinavia, including Gotland, the impact would have been especially serious. Poor harvests, food shortages, livestock stress and social disruption could have made prosperous farmsteads unsustainable. Archaeologists have long connected the mid-sixth-century downturn in parts of Sweden to widespread settlement abandonment and buried valuables that were never recovered. In this case, the Gotland hoard itself appears to have been buried around **A.D. 450**, before the 536 event. But archaeologist Per Widerström’s point is that the **farm may have been abandoned later, in the mid-500s**, during or after this climate crisis. If so, the owners may never have returned for the hidden silver and gold because the volcanic winter and its aftermath upended life across the region.

2 articles · Updated · Fox News · Nov 1

A final metal-detector sweep at Sweden's Gotland Regiment base uncovered 45 second-century Roman silver coins and a gold finger ring beside a farmhouse foundation.
Officials said the hoard emerged during excavations for a military-base expansion; one first coin bore Emperor Antoninus Pius, and experts later linked the cache to five emperors and four empresses.
Archaeologists believe the coins reached Gotland in the fourth century, circulated for generations and were buried around A.D. 450, possibly as a sacrifice when the settlement was being abandoned.
Two coins may be ancient counterfeits from what is now Ukraine, while the ring was the more unusual find at the site, according to Gotland Museum archaeologist Per Widerström.
Elsewhere on the grounds, excavators found nine graves about 2,000 years old, including nearly 10 pounds of burned human bones, adding to evidence of a larger settlement active from the fourth to sixth centuries.