Hidden treasures

This exhibition includes many archaeological finds. Of course, in the Middle Ages, people could also find objects left by those who had lived before. Most people were peasants who dug and hoed the soil and cleared away stones and roots by hand. Sometimes, they must have come across precious objects, such as silver and gold treasures from the Iron Age. There were also many preserved burial mounds that could contain treasures. At that time, people did not treat finds as cultural heritage that needed to be preserved, but were only concerned with whether they had value and who should profit from them.

The general rule in the Laws of the Land was that the king should have one third, the finder should have one third, and the inheritor of the allodial land in which the mound was located should have one third. The owner of the land would get the last third if it was not allodial. The Laws of the Land prohibited digging for goods in someone else’s land or burial mounds without permission and for personal gain. This suggests that it must have been common to go treasure hunting in burial mounds or to find objects when people cleared away mounds to create more farming land – most likely both. Most metal items were probably melted or reforged.

Today, we have the Cultural Heritage Act, which dates back to 1905. The law automatically grants protection to all cultural heritage items older than 1537. Anyone who finds artefacts older than 1537 or coins minted before 1650 is obliged to turn them in to the cultural heritage authorities. For maritime and Sami cultural heritage items, anything older than 100 years is automatically protected. For rare and valuable finds, there is a system whereby a finder’s reward is equally divided between the finder and the landowner. Regional archaeological museums, such as the University Museum of Bergen, are responsible for taking care of these objects.