Rare Viking Crucifix Found with Metal Detector
The small gold object, made in the image of Christ on the cross -- is estimated to be Denmark's oldest crucifix.
A rare Viking crucifix pendant has emerged from a Danish field, brought to light by an amateur metal detectorist two weeks before Easter.
The small gold object, made in the shape of a man with outstretched arms - the image of Christ on the cross - is estimated to be Denmark's oldest crucifix.
Dating from the first half of the 900s (10th century), the pendant has shed new light on Christianity in Denmark, according to experts at the Viking Museum at Ladby, where the crucifix is now kept.
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"It's older than Harald Bluetooth's runic stone in Jelling," the museum said in a statement.
The stones in the town of Jelling feature a figure on the cross and commemorate Harald Bluetooth's conversion of the Danes to Christianity.
Until now, the massive runestones, estimated to date from 965 A.D., were believed to be the earliest depiction of Jesus on a cross in Denmark.
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Representing the best-known religious symbol of Christianity, the newly found crucifix would show that Danes embraced Christian faith earlier than previously thought.
The precious object was found by amateur metal detectorist Dennis Fabricius Holm in the fields around a church in the village of Aunslev, on the Danish island Funen.
"It's pure luck that the little jewelry has survived the last 1,100 years in the earth," the museum said.
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The figure measures 1.6 inches in height and weighs 0.45 ounces. While the back surface is smooth, the front is made of finely articulated goldthreads and tiny fillagree pellets. At the top a small eye for a chain is mounted.
"The cross looks a lot like the gilded silver cross found in 1879 in Birka near Stockholm in Sweden, in a female grave from the Viking Age," the museum said.
Silver fragments of similar crosses were found in female graves dating to the first half of the 10th century, but the Aunslev cross is the first Danish specimen in full figure.
"It was probably worn by a Viking woman, but it cannot yet be decided, whether the cross was to show that she was a Christian Viking or was just a part of a pagan Viking's bling-bling," the museum said.
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According to Swedish archaeologist Martin Rundkvist, who first announced the findings on his blog, the crucifixes are too similar for more than one or two people to have been making them.
"The first crucifix was found at Birka near Stockholm. But the second, third and fourth one have been found near Hedeby in Denmark. That is probably were they were made," Rundkvist told Discovery News.
"Birka, Hedeby and a group of other towns in northern Europe shared an itinerant population of traders and craftspeople," he said.
The Aunslev cross will be on exhibit at the Viking Museum in Ladby until the Easter holiday, then it will sent to a lab for preservation.
In the summer it will be part of an exhibition in the museum that will show some recent Viking Age finds made in eastern Funen with metal detectors.
This newly found crucifix would show that Danes embraced Christian faith earlier than previously thought.
Egypt will likely offer promising finds in 2016. King Tutankhamun's tomb will be under the spotlight as
suggests the western and northern walls of the 3,300-year-old burial may hide two secret chambers. According to Egypt's Minister of Antiquity Mamdouh al-Damaty there is a 90 percent chance the tomb of King Tut contains such chambers. Damaty made the announcement last November at the end of a radar-based investigation. The non-invasive search followed a claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, who first speculated the existence of the chambers, arguing that one contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods, from queen Nefertiti. She was the wife of the "heretic" monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's father. Will archaeologists try to access the hidden chambers? Their attempt may lead to what Damaty called "one of the most important finds of the century."
The noninvasive technologies applied to King Tut's tomb will be widely used this year in another ambitious project. Called Scan Pyramid, the investigation is carried out by a team from Cairo University's Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation under the authority of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. The project aims to scan the largest pyramids of Egypt in order to detect the presence of any unknown internal structures and cavities. The technique could lead to a better understanding of the pyramids' structure and how they were built. The project uses a mix of technologies such as infrared thermography, muon radiography, and 3D reconstruction to look at the inside of four pyramids, which are more than 4,500 years old. They include Khufu, or Cheops, Khafre or Chephren at Giza, the Bent pyramid and the Red pyramid at Dahshur. One
particularly remarkable anomaly
has been already detected on the eastern side of the Great Pyramid, also known as Khufu or Cheops, at the ground level. Much more is to come -- the first results are expected in the first months of the year.
Last year a study made an
extraordinary and controversial claim
: Stonehenge was basically a second-hand monument from Wales. It would have stood there hundreds of years before it was dismantled and transported to Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. The research indicates that two quarries in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales, are the source of Stonehenge's bluestones. Carbon dating revealed such stones were dug out at least 500 years before Stonehenge was built -- suggesting they were first used in a local monument that was later dismantled and dragged off to England. "Stonehenge was a Welsh monument from its very beginning. If we can find the original monument in Wales from which it was built, we will finally be able to solve the mystery," Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project and professor of British later prehistory at University College London said. Researchers have been using geophysical surveys, trial excavations and aerial photographic analysis to identify the ruins of a lost, dismantled monument. The results of such research promise to make the headlines this year. "We think we have the most likely spot. We may find something big in 2016," Kate Welham, of Bournemouth University, said.
In early December,
the Colombian government announced
they had found the holy grail of treasure shipwrecks -- an 18th-century Spanish galleon that went down off the country's coast with a treasure of gold, coins and precious stones now valued between $4 billion and $17 billion. The multibillion-dollar ship, called the San Jose, was found off the island of Baru, near Cartagena. The vessel was part of Spain's only royal convoy to bring colonial coins and bullion home to King Philip V during the War of Spanish Succession from 1701 to 1714. The San Jose was trying to outrun a fleet of British warships off the island of Baru on June 8, 1708, when an explosion sent it to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. She was reportedly carrying 600 people, chests of emeralds and tons of silver, gold and platinum. The shipwreck has been at a center of a decades-long search that also involved a legal battle with the Seattle-based Sea Search Armada, or SSA, a commercial salvage company that claims it first discovered the wreck's location in 1981. Moreover, Peru has argued that any treasure recovered from the San Jose should be considered a Peruvian national patrimony. As more legal fights will likely occur, new expeditions to the wreck in 2016 are expected to recover the much disputed treasure of gold and emeralds.
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One of the most promising discoveries last year was
unearthed in the Tuscan town of Volterra. Archaeologists believe it represents the most important Roman amphitheater finding over the last century. The foundations of the colosseum, which is oval-shaped like the much larger arena in the heart of Rome, might date back to the 1st century A.D. Amphitheaters like these were used during Roman times to feature events including gladiator combats and wild animal fights. The archaeologists estimate the structure, which mostly lies at a depth of 20 to 32 feet, measured some 262 by 196 feet. Only a small part of it has been unearthed during a small dig survey. New finds are expected this year as a full-scale dig is launched.