‘Trove’ of Danish king unearthed in Germany

Boy finds Bluetooth treasures

BERLIN, Germany, April 16, (AFP): A 13-year-old boy and an amateur archaeologist have unearthed a “significant” treasure trove in Germany which may have belonged to the legendary Danish king Harald Bluetooth who brought Christianity to Denmark.

Rene Schoen and his student Luca Malaschnitschenko were looking for treasure using metal detectors in January on northern Ruegen island when they chanced upon what they initially thought was a worthless piece of aluminium.

But upon closer inspection, they realised that it was a shimmering piece of silver, German media reported.

A dig covering 400 square metres (4,300 square feet) that finally started over the weekend by the regional archaeology service has since uncovered a trove believed linked to the Danish king who reigned from around 958 to 986.

Braided necklaces, pearls, brooches, a Thor’s hammer, rings and up to 600 chipped coins were found, including more than 100 that date back to Bluetooth’s era.

“This trove is the biggest single discovery of Bluetooth coins in the southern Baltic sea region and is therefore of great significance,” lead archaeologist Michael Schirren told national news agency DPA.

The oldest coin found in the trove is a Damascus dirham dating to 714 while the most recent is a penny dating to 983.

The find suggests that the treasure may have been buried in the late 980s — also the period when Bluetooth was known to have fled to Pomerania where he died in 987. she visited family members in India, and found the streams and grass where she had played as a child had shriveled as a result of drought.

“Someplace that I knew really well turned into something unrecognisable,” said Shiney-Ajay, now 20 and a student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

So she turned to the Sunrise Movement, a US-based youth network that aims to “build an army of young people to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process”.

“When I think of climate change, I am driven by fear and anger,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

But her activism — including occupying the office of Republican

Luca

House Representative Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania last December with other Sunrise Movement members — has given her a feeling she can make a difference.

The sit-in, she said, was an attempt to stop Meehan from voting on a tax bill that would provide tax cuts to fossil fuel billionaires, among others. Meehan voted for the bill anyway, which passed last December — but Shiney-Ajay now knows how to take a stand.

Her generation is ready to act on climate change, which is a “preventable crisis”, she said. That’s particularly true because younger people — who will live to see the more severe impacts of climate change — have more at stake. (RTRS(