"In a practice in northern Europe dating from the Bronze Age through Anglo-Saxon times, swords and other objects, many conspicuously valuable, were deposited in bogs, rivers, and streams as well as in the ground.
"We can no longer see hoards only as piggy banks," says Kevin Leahy, an authority on Anglo-Saxon history who was entrusted with the task of cataloging the Staffordshire treasure. Ritual deposits, as opposed to caches buried for safekeeping, are found not only in Britain but also in Scandinavia, homeland of some of England's Germanic tribes.
Significantly, many weapons—and sometimes other objects, such as a craftsman's tools—were, like the objects in the hoard, bent or broken before burial. Perhaps "killing" a weapon dispatched it to the land of spirits or rendered it a votive offering to the gods, its destruction representing the donor's irrevocable surrender of the valuable weapon's use."
That is an interesting theory, but the objects pictured were not weapons; they were adornment. Well, maybe you could think of them as a woman’s, or a man’s, weapons, used to provoke envy in onlookers.
Well, sacrificing precious objects is more civilized than sacrificing virgins.