Hezingen, The Netherlands - deposits of coins and jewelry

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Offerings for Their Gods at This Ancient Cult Site
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...eir-gods-at-this-ancient-cult-site-180986048/

Researchers excavated the deposits of coins and jewelry in the Netherlands, near the German borderResearchers in the eastern Netherlands have discovered an ancient site used for cult rituals, as evidenced by structural remains and deposits of silver and gold coins and jewelry. This so-called “devil’s money,” which was left as offerings for pagan gods, may represent some of the last such tributes made by locals before they converted to Christianity in the eighth century.

Located in the village of Hezingen, some 80 miles east of Amsterdam, the site was excavated in 2020 and 2021, after metal detectorists unearthed some coins in the area. According to a statement, the site was likely built in the early seventh century and used for around 100 years by local pagans. The researchers detailed their findings in a study published in the journal Medieval Archaeology last December.

“The people here were undoubtedly Germanic,” lead author Jan-Willem de Kort, an archaeologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. Hezingen lies within the territory of the Saxons, the former residents of modern-day Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Buried at the Hezingen site, researchers discovered 25 gold coins, as well as gold pendants and a fragment of a silver earring. As de Kort tells Live Science, these treasures were buried in several deposits that might have constituted offerings to a pagan god—possibly Wodan, the Germanic persona of the Norse god Odin.

Hezingen once lay just north of the Roman Empire’s northern border, the Lower German Limes. Germanic peoples repeatedly attacked that border and took back the land Rome had conquered, long before the Hezingen site was built in the 600s. But by the late eighth century, Christian missionaries like Plechelmus and Lebuinus had spread the gospel to Hezingen, and the region’s first Christian churches were built, says de Kort in the statement.

As missionaries arrived in Germania, they recorded the habits of local pagans, writing that in order to convert to Christianity, these individuals needed to renounce their old gods and stop offering them “devil’s money.”