Friday, June 25, 2010

Gold worn by Irish Kings found in dumpster

My kind of story: thieves tell the police where they dumped a 4000 year old necklace, but there is not much time to retrieve it before it is compacted.
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/4000-Year-Old-necklace-found-in-dumpster-97144989.html

Heck, maybe I had better copy most of the article here in case the link stops working. Story dated June 25, 2010.


A gold lunula from Coggalbeg, Co. Roscommon
A gold lunula from Coggalbeg, Co. Roscommon
A 4,000 year old necklace is in The National Museum of Ireland  after it was found in a dumpster.
Worn by early kings the necklace, called a lunala, and discs were worn by the early kings of Ireland. It is thought to day from between 2,300 and 1,800 BC.
In March 1945 it was found in Coggalbeg, County Roscommonby farmer Hubert Lannon. He found it in a bog while he was cutting turf and kept it in his home.
Two years later he passed the necklace on to a local chemist Patrick Sheehan, in Strokestown, who kept the priceless piece of history in his shops' safe. There it remained until February 2009 when two thieves grabbed the safe during a burglary.
In March this year two men pleaded guilty for the burglary and were given three year suspended sentences. Working with the police curators from the National Museum’s Irish Antiquities Division found out that the jewelry along with other documents and papers from the Sheehan’s safe had been left in a dumpster in Dublin.
By the time the police had received this information they literally had hours to locate the dumpster before the trash would be collected. The detectives who waded through a dumpster of trash to find the delicate jewelry, which weighs just 78 grams, were rewarded on the retrieval of the treasures.
The three pieces, the necklace and two discs, are thought to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries for many years. As the Museum director Pat Wallace said himself “There is a whole lot of conjoined freaks of good luck to make it possible.”

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