The Viking Age (800–1050 A.D.) is also called the “Silver Age”. Despite the fact that no silver mines were in use in Sweden at that time, most of the landowners for one reason or another had a lot of precious metal stored in their homes.

Alone the Island of Gotland has found over 700 different hoards of which around 400 of these hoards have been excavated over the last 100 years. Archeologists are debating whether all this precious metal had been brought to the island by traders from the east, or if it came from the Viking raids in the west. Besides the coins, thousands of pieces of silver have been recorded.

The intention of this essay is to attempt to clarify if it is possible to find differentiating factors between the hoards and to classify categories of these precious metal deposits. I indeed, such classifications and categorizations are achievable in the research findings in this paper.