LONDON — Two amateur treasure hunters are in line for a pay-out of up to about $1 million after a small pot that they found buried in a field turned out to contain the most important hoard of Viking silver and gold found in Britain for 150 years.

Packed inside the ornately carved 8th-century silver gilt pot, experts at the British Museum found 617 coins, jewelry, and ingots from as far afield as Samarkand, Afghanistan, Russia, France, and Ireland. The pot had been buried in a field near Harrogate in Yorkshire, probably in the year 927.

“This really is the world in a vessel,” said Jonathan Williams, the keeper of European pre-history at the British Museum, where the treasure was put on display yesterday. “It is a quite incredible find and a very special moment for us at the museum.”

The discovery was made in January — but kept secret until yesterday — by a father and son, David and Andrew Whelan, from Leeds. They had spent hundreds of hours over the past three years scouring local fields with metal detectors without finding anything of value.

After the North Yorkshire coroner yesterday declared the find to be treasure — entitling the Whelans to half its value and the farmer on whose land it was discovered to the other half — David Whelan, 51, semi-retired, described his moment of triumph as “a thing of dreams.”

Once cleaned, the pot, 4 inches high, was found to be silver gilt, possibly an ecclesiastical vessel plundered from northern France. It is carved with vines, leaves, and six hunting scenes showing lions, stags, and a horse.

The value of the hoard is to be determined by an independent tribunal, but yesterday it was conservatively put at about $1.5 million, although some suggested that it may well be worth more than $2 million.

To David Whelan, the value matters little. He said, “We’ve got all we want. If we had found one coin, we would have been over the moon.”