4 silver Viking Age bracelets discovered 'untouched' on Norway mountainside after more than 1,000 years

Archaeologists in Norway have discovered a Viking Age treasure that had remained "untouched" for more than 1,000 years.

The four silver bracelets had been buried nearly 8 inches (20 centimeters) in the ground on a mountainside in Årdal, a village in southwestern Norway, according to a translated statement from the University of Stavanger. 

"This is definitely the biggest thing I have experienced in my career," Volker Demuth, an archaeologist and project manager at the Archaeological Museum at the University of Stavanger, said in the statement.

Archaeologists found the bracelets ahead of construction of a new tractor road. Because some of the ninth-century jewelry had twisted designs, researchers initially thought they had unearthed copper wires in the soil.

"At first I thought it was a question of some twisted copper wires that you can often find in agricultural land, but [then] I saw that there were several lying next to each other and that they were not copper at all, but silver," Ola Tengesdal Lygre, a staff engineer at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger, said in the statement. "I realized that we had found something exciting."

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Further exploration revealed that the location once housed a "large and powerful" Viking Age (A.D. 793 to 1066) farm comprising multiple houses for people and animals, according to the statement. The researchers found the buried bracelets within one of the smaller structures, which likely housed enslaved individuals.