Three early-medieval stashes of gold and silver pieces, alongside hundreds of coins, have been discovered at a "cult site" in the Netherlands. The 1,300-year-old finds may be "devil's money" — coins or valuable treasures offered to pagan gods — that were opposed by early Christian missionaries in the region, a new paper reports.
"The people here were undoubtedly Germanic," said study lead author and excavation leader Jan-Willem de Kort, an archaeologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. The site was on land traditionally seen as Saxon territory, but the locals may not have called themselves Saxons. "Probably this is more a term by which outsiders referred to the pagans as a group," he told Live Science.
