"Liked" Tweet of the Week: Rescuing Artefacts from Scrap and Polishing Them

     "When the sun don't shine bury your gold"   

Over on Twitter I retweeted a news item about a Danish metal detectorist finding a gold treasure, and picked out one sentence from it as a byline: "At the end of December 2020, an inexperienced hobby archaeologist dug up 945 grams of gold from the ground in a field near the Jelling stones". To me that flags up all sorts of issues. Unfortunately, the website is set up in a way that prioritises form over context and my attempts to treat the text as a coherent account led to it breaking up into soundbite-size fragments floating around in a sea of pictures of shiny things like in a deranged goldfish bowl. All the pictures showed shiny objects, rather than the excavated context. 

For eight months, the Vejlemuseerne and the Nationalmuseet have kept a golden secret. At the end of December 2020, an inexperienced hobby archaeologist dug up 945 grams of gold from the ground in a field near the Jelling stones. Since then, the museums' specialists in all discretion have closely studied the numerous gold objects [...] After the hobby archaeologist fished the 22 gold pieces out of the ground in December, the archaeologists at Vejlemuseerne have started a major excavation, where they have vacuumed the corn field for several finds. [...] The next step now is that each item must be carefully straightened and polished [sic?]. In February, they will glimpse from the display cases at Vejle Art Museum. They were the ones who were handed the find by Ole Schytz, who chases things from the past in his spare time. And in fact, he was just about to hurl [? kyle] the first bracteates for scrap. [Google translator]

There is also some folksy and attempted topical narrativisation speculating about these ancestors burying a hoard to "make the sun shine again" (related to the extreme weather events of 535–536).

I can't get out of mind the hope that this story has got it wrong about the museum being about to get these artefacts "straightened and polished". No! More to the point, it reports that 22 items were hoiked out of the ground by  an inexperienced searcher who, it is reported, was prevented somehow from selling some of the gold for scrap (some of them what was the reason that he was not scrapping all of them if he did not want them?). There is a whole chunk of the story missing here. The article - as usual concentrates on the "lucky find" aspect, the typical trope of "experts being delighted", and "the experts have an answer to the mystery, and it will surprise and entertain you", and (indirectly) how much nearly a kilogramme of dugup gold is worth (they did not add "but the scientific value is priceless"). Thankfully we did not see a "ancient gold cursed by a vengeful sun-god" either).

Another thing we (thankfully) don't see is any reference to that Danish construct "Metalldetektor Archeologie". If Mr Schytz was, as it says, on the point of melting some of the finds down for scrap, that requires some explanation from all those folk who tell us that all is well in the Kingdom of Denmark as far as metal detector use goes.

My curiosity is piqued, however, by the question why followers of my Twitter account (@PortantIssues) have been "liking" this retweeted post in such numbers. Is it that they read the article to the bottom despite the bobbing pictures of gold objects and share my concern, or are they delighted by the bobbing pictures of all that gold? or is it the idea that an inexperienced guy with a metal detector made a lucky find? None of them bothered to comment on it, so I'm regretfully concluding its probably the bobbing gold.