Archaeologists have unearthed some incredible, history-defining artefacts over the years, but it isn’t just the professionals who have found top treasures. From Sutton Hoo, featured in Netflix film The Dig, to an Enigma machine discovered by divers to Australia's biggest dinosaur, the stories of ordinary people and amateur hunters who have discovered some of the most significant historical finds in the last century are nothing short of extraordinary. Click or scroll through to read the tales behind these incredible treasure finds.

The excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England first started during the Tudor period in the 1600s. The site was then plundered 200 years later by treasure-seekers in want of blacksmith materials. But it was only in 1938 that the historic significance of the site really started to come to light. Local landowner Edith Pretty asked self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown to investigate the burial mounds on her property, which were already suspected to be Anglo-Saxon hiding places. A year into excavation works, Brown unearthed the imprint of a 27-metre(89-foot)-long ship, with a ruined burial chamber stuffed with treasure at its core...

Byzantine silverware, lavish gold jewellery, an opulent feasting set and fragments of an ornate iron helmet (pictured) were among the hoard of goods. The site was revealed to be the royal burial site of Raedwald, the king of the East Anglia region between 599 AD and 624 AD, making its contents around 1,400 years old. Sutton Hoo is now managed by the National Trust charity, and its fascinating history and discovery is the subject of recent Netflix film The Dig, starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes. 

Theo and Miriam Siebenberg moved into a newly-built house close to Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 1970. Living in such close proximity to a site venerated for its holy qualities, the couple wondered whether their new home could also be hiding any religious artefacts. Several archaeological surveys denied that there was anything to be found, but the Siebenbergs spent the next eight years digging in hope of finding something special. In fact, they constructed a retaining wall with anchors that could hold up to 60 tonnes of pressure to prevent their house from collapsing during their investigation.

And they weren't disappointed. A 2,000-year-old keyring was the first item pulled out of the ground, followed by perfume bottles and 2,600-year-old arrowheads. The deeper investigations went, the more treasures were unearthed, from jewellery and glassware to ancient burial chambers dating back 3,000 years to the era of King David. After a decade of careful excavation, the Siebenberg household became the Siebenberg Museum (pictured), which now exhibits treasures illustrating the history of Jerusalem over thousands of years.

A holiday to Cornwall in 1974 led to quite the souvenir for one British family, as they came across a washed-up treasure on the beach. The copper ingot may not have looked spectacular, but maritime historians believed the metal block could help in their quest to locate the wreckage of St Anthony, a Portuguese ship that had vanished at sea in 1526…

A team of experts scoured the area where the ingot had been found and in 1981, they discovered the long-lost remains of the shipwreck. The vessel’s timbers had been crushed by the rocky gullies on the sea bed, and sadly the artefacts that were recovered were in terrible condition, having decayed over almost five centuries. But the mystery had been solved. The St Anthony had become wrecked on a journey from Lisbon to Antwerp after the anchors of the 350-tonne ship had snapped. The captain had deliberately attempted to run the vessel ashore, but hit a hidden reef. Tragically, half of the crew went down with the ship.

Ken Allen was digging a pond in his garden in South Gloucestershire, England in 2004, when he came across a pile of coins nestled in a shard of pottery. Pulling the discovery out of the ground wasn’t a solo effort, as the whole lot weighed in at a hefty 63lb (28.6kg).

What Allen had unearthed was a collection of 11,460 Roman copper alloy coins, which experts have dated back to between 260 AD and 348 AD. The find was reported to the authorities and was officially declared to be treasure. The coin collection was valued at £40,000, the equivalent of £62,800 ($86.9k) in today’s money, and pieces can be viewed at both the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, and Thornbury Museum.

In 2004, Australian teenager Sandy Mackenzie found an unusual rock around the size of a fist on his parents' farmland in Queensland. Despite the fact that much of prehistoric Australia was underwater, and therefore many of the fossils of dinosaurs who may have lived there had been thought to have eroded away, the 14-year-old's find was identified as a dinosaur bone, and was the catalyst for a series of dinosaur discoveries for the Mackenzie family. Sandy's mother Robyn was bitten by the dinosaur fossil hunting bug, and in 2007 discovered the skeleton of what would be the Australotitan cooperensis, or "Southern Titan", along with her team. Pictured is Robyn (right) with Dr Scott Hocknull holding a replica of the dinosaur's humerus bone.

The Southern Titan would have measured up to 21 feet (6.5m) tall and been "as long as a basketball court". Pictured is a render of what the dinosaur, which was classified by scientists as the largest discovered in the country just last week, could have looked like. The Mackenzie family are sheep and cattle grazers but Robyn has now forged a career in paleontology, and is Director of the Eromanga Natural History Museum, where the Southern Titan can be seen.

Digging a pond in your garden is a great way to find treasure if these examples are anything to go by, as the residents of one Hackney property in London found out in 2007. Three weeks into the garden renovations, a glass jar stuffed with 80 gold coins emerged. Intriguingly the money had come from across the Atlantic, as it was a collection of immaculate US Double-Eagle coins.

The stash was donated to officials at the Museum of London, who identified the coins as having belonged to German-Jewish refugee Martin Sulzbacher. Anticipating a Nazi invasion, Martin’s brother had buried the hoard in his back garden in 1940, and only his closest family members knew its hiding place. Sadly, the family was killed shortly afterwards during a bombing raid, and the secret died with them. The museum was eventually able to track down the owner’s descendants and handed over the £100,000 ($138k) find.

When you buy a house you probably don't anticipate that you will be living above a homage to an ancient civilisation, but that is exactly what happened to Mehmet Keleş. Keleş was planting orange saplings in his 10-acre garden in the Arpaçiftlik district of Turkey in 2006 when he discovered a portion of mosaic. The retired father-of-three informed Hatay Museum (pictured) and an extensive excavation project (pictured) commenced the following year. Items discovered on the plot have so far included mosaics, animal figures, stone tombs, bone remains and the pièce de résistance: a 6th-century Holy Apostles church.

The entire Keleş family has become involved in the exciting project that has monopolised their backyard and it is hoped that the findings will shed light on the ancient city of Rhosus, which is now known as Arsuz (pictured). The excavation site will eventually be turned into an open-air museum.

Skeletons of now-extinct creatures are an exciting find, and in 2007 one Nenets reindeer herder in Siberia found animal remains unlike any ever seen by archaeologists. Yuri Khudi discovered a baby mammoth that had died 42,000 years ago, immaculately preserved in the permafrost – so perfect, in fact, that her eyelashes were still intact.

Palaeontologists were able to gather lots of information about the mammoth’s lifestyle and biology from her remarkable state, including details of her diet, her digestive system, and even how she may have died all those thousands of years ago. The ancient mammal was named Lyuba, after Khudi’s wife, and she currently resides at the Shemanovskiy Museum and Exhibition Center in Salekhard, Russia.

Voted in 2017 as the UK's top treasure hoard of the last 20 years by readers of The Telegraph, this hoard was discovered near Frome in Somerset, England in April 2010 by prospector Dave Crisp (pictured). The amateur metal detectorist was investigating a local field when he started to pluck pieces of pottery and coins out of the ground. Realising what he had discovered may require an expert eye, Crisp left the prospective treasure where he had found it and contacted the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records archaeological finds in the UK.

After two days of careful excavation, a team of archaeologists had unveiled 52,503 silver and bronze coins dating between 250 AD to 290 AD and weighing in at 352lbs (160kg). The discovery was the second largest Roman hoard ever found in Britain and after 12 weeks of studying the coins it became clear that they spanned around 30 different rulers from that period. The collection was bought by the Museum of Somerset in 2011 for £320,000 ($520k).

Money may not grow on trees, but one couple came surprisingly close when they discovered a pot of 1,411 rare gold coins beneath a tree in their garden in Northern California in 2013. Most of the mint-condition coins dated from 1847 to 1894, and they had been stashed away during the Gold Rush that swept through the Golden State during the 19th century. In fact, it is the largest hoard of this nature found in the US, and around 12 of the coins were in such good condition they were declared to be some of the best surviving examples of their kind. 

The hoard has a face value of $28,000, but due to the coins' rarity and condition they were valued at an incredible $10 million (£7.2m) in 2013, although around half of that sum would go straight to tax authorities. The lucky California couple who found the hoard, known only as John and Mary to the media, sold a stack of the coins via auction and through Amazon. Some of the coins were also kept as keepsakes. The location where the hoard was found remains a secret to this day.

Friends Mark Hambleton and Joe Kana are avid metal detectorists, and the pair had taken their hobby to a field in Staffordshire, England in 2016 when one of them made an extraordinary discovery. Hambleton had all but given up for the day when Kana reached into his pocket and produced a golden torc he’d found nearby.

In total, Hambleton and Kana unearthed three necklaces and a bracelet, and expert analysis later uncovered that the jewellery was likely around 2,500 years old and dated back to 400-250BC. The torcs are believed to be the oldest Iron Age gold ever discovered in Britain. The centuries-old jewellery has since been valued at £325,000 ($450k) and was bought by the local Potteries Museum & Art Gallery for display purposes.

Tax evasion was shown to be an age-old phenomenon in 2019, when metal detectorists Lisa Grace and Adam Staples discovered a hoard of tampered-with coins dating back to Britain’s Norman period. The pair unearthed a total of 2,529 coins during a thunderstorm in Somerset, England on a weekend away to the area.

The coins depicted images of both William the Conqueror and the defeated King Harold II. The differing patterns on each side indicate that the person striking the coins was likely avoiding paying for the up-to-date coin design – an offence punishable by the loss of a hand. The 1,000-year-old hoard has an estimated value of £5 million ($6.9m).

Jon Gopsill was enjoying a beach walk in Somerset, England when his dogs Poppy and Sam led him to something unusual in the sand. What the spaniels had spotted was the fossil of an ichthyosaur, a large marine reptile that experts later assessed to be around 190 million years old (similar to the one pictured). The 167cm skeleton was found in remarkable condition, although its head was missing, and the Museum of Somerset hopes to eventually display the prehistoric creature.

There are many different types of ichthyosaur, such as the shastasaurus (an interpretation is pictured), but archaeologists haven’t ruled out the possibility of this being a previously undiscovered species. If that is the case, Gopsill hopes that it will be named Poppyisamosaur, in honour of the canines that made the discovery.

Builders renovating the Nacional Monte de Piedad pawn shop in Mexico City got more than they bargained for in July 2020 when their work unveiled the history of centuries past. The shop had been established in 1755, but further investigations revealed that before then the building had housed some fairly notable historical figures…

After discovering several layers of basalt slabs, archaeologists deduced that the pawn shop had formerly been home to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, who is held largely responsible for toppling the Aztec Empire in the 16th century. Experts also found evidence suggesting that, before Cortés moved in, Aztec ruler Axayácatl (pictured) had lived in the same location in the 1400s. The site is made up of remains, but archaeologists and historians suspect that the space was a palace courtyard back in the day.

Now read about the other top treasure discoveries of 2020

Last year a group of divers were searching for abandoned fishing nets in Gelting Bay in the Baltic Sea on behalf of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) when they found an unexpected nugget of history. Tangled in one of the nets was what appeared to be a typewriter but, once pulled out of the water, experts deduced that it was in fact an Enigma, the machine used by the Nazis to communicate encrypted messages during World War II.

Experts suspect that the three-rotor Enigma had been thrown overboard as a German warship made its way through the European sea in the final days of the war. The machine was handed over to the Archaeological Museum in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where a thorough desalination process is underway to restore the Enigma, which had been surrounded by saltwater for the last seven decades. Museum officials anticipate that the process will take a year, and then the Enigma will be available for public viewing. These machines have huge historic and monetary value, as shown by an example (pictured) which sold for £347,250 ($480k) through auction house Christie’s in 2020.

Sewage workers in Athens, Greece became unexpected treasure finders in November last year, when they uncovered an ancient bust of the Greek god Hermes. The head dates back to around 300 BC – making it around 2,300 years old – and was found in remarkably good condition given its age and underground location.

This particular bust of Hermes had originally served as a street marker, before it was built into the wall of a drainage duct. Historians were excited not only by its unlikely location, but also because it depicted the Greek god “at a mature age”, which is rare. Most reimaginings show the deity in a younger and more athletic form, such as this interpretation at Massimo Museum in Rome, Italy.

Museums might be an obvious place to find treasure but in December last year, a member of staff at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland uncovered a long-last artefact within another artefact. Curatorial assistant Abeer Eladany was carrying out inventory checks when she found a fragment of wood inside a cigar box. This wasn’t just any old sliver of wood though, as it is believed to have been used during the construction of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt around 5,000 years ago.

Engineer Waynman Dixon had originally discovered the cedar fragments in 1872, when he explored the Great Pyramid’s Queen’s Chamber. The wood was then donated to the Scottish university in 1946, but after that its whereabouts became unknown. Last year’s rediscovery was hailed as a fantastic find, as the wood is one of only three items to have ever been recovered from the oldest and largest of Giza’s pyramids. A copper hook and a small dolerite ball (pictured) make up the rest of the trio known as the Dixon Relics.

Mariusz Stepien was exploring a field near Peebles, Scotland with his metal detector, when he located what has since been described as one of the country’s most significant Bronze Age hoards. Stepien knew he had discovered something special in the bronze object he’d unearthed, and a 22-day excavation confirmed his suspicions by revealing an abundance of historical artefacts.

Among the Peebles hoard was a complete horse harness and saddle, which are believed to be around 3,000 years old. A sword was also unveiled (similar in age to the one pictured), along with buckles, straps and chariot wheel axle caps, all of which had been magnificently preserved by the surrounding soil. The treasures were taken to the National Museums Collection Centre in Edinburgh and, while they have yet to be assigned a monetary value, their historical importance to Scotland is priceless.

Now read: The most valuable metal detector finds ever