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An Unlikely Discovery: The Intriguing Story of Roman Coins on a Remote Baltic Isle

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4 min readApr 15, 2023

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Archaeologists have found two silver coins that were minted during the Roman Empire. They were found on a tiny Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Scientists are not sure who left them there.

[Photo: The Portable Antiquities Scheme/ The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Gotska Sandön is a small island with an area of only 36 km², which lies in the Baltic Sea. It belongs to the Swedish province of Gotland. The area is overgrown with natural pine forest and covered with sand dunes. The island is the site of a national park, which was established in 1909.

2 Roman coins have been found on an uninhabited Swedish island

Three lighthouses were built here, but only two are operational. There is also a museum on site, housed in a former school. Although Gotska Sandön used to be a fishing and hunting base, and traces of a permanent human presence even date back to the Middle Ages, today the park’s employees and lighthouse staff are the island’s only permanent residents.

It was on this tiny island that Swedish archaeologists found two Roman coins. The researchers made the discovery while searching the beach with a metal detector. The researchers initially searched where the hearths used to be located. It was near one of them that they came across artifacts dating back to the…

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