The German state of Saxony unveiled a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age hoard of 310 artifacts - including 136 sickles and 50 axes - and classified it as “of immeasurable scientific value” and “a stroke of luck,” according to Süddeutsche Zeitung. The State Office for Archaeology said it was the second largest find of its kind in Saxony.
“We are dealing with a truly spectacular find. It is a great fortune that these treasures from the distant past have been discovered,” said Saxony’s Minister-President Michael Kretschmer, who called it the largest “Bronze Age find” in Upper Lusatia. He said the discovery moved him because it recalled his school visits to the Görlitz museum, where archaeological pieces were explained to children.
The hoard lay about 50 centimeters deep in a field near Görlitz and totaled about 16 kilograms of jewelry, weapons, and tools. The discovery began in summer 2023, when Dr. Jasper von Richthofen, director of the Görlitz Collections for History and Culture, and 25 certified metal detectorists searched a field in Klein Neundorf for hours. As the team prepared to stop due to heat, Henry Herrmann expanded the grid and found fragments of sickles. The team then concentrated on that area. “The finds lay in the earth as they were 3,000 years ago,” said von Richthofen, according to Bild.
Because many pieces remained in the ground, the team kept the location secret and secured it overnight. “A helper parked his car over the hole,” said von Richthofen. To deter illegal digging and protect the farm, volunteer detectorists swept adjacent fields. The hoard was lifted as a block and uncovered over months by the State Office for Archaeology in Dresden, with earth and clay slowly removed.
Regina Smolnik, the state archaeologist and a prehistorian, said the artifacts were buried for ritual purposes as offerings to gods and that researchers aimed to learn more about sacrificial rites and settlement activity. “A hoard find does not occur every day and presents us with special challenges in restoration, documentation, and analysis,” she emphasized. She thanked the volunteer detectorists and noted a surge of interest in the hobby; the state office said 320 people were registered as metal detectorists, 95 percent of them men.
Bronze is made of copper and tin, which were not available locally, and the find promised new insights through examination with current technology. Smolnik dated the hoard to the end of the Bronze Age, around 800 BCE, and said it indicated long-distance trade. She added that society at the time was strongly hierarchical, with elites on hilltops such as the Görlitzer Landeskrone.
A historical link emerged from the same area: during a potato harvest in 1900, children found three bronze daggers in the field at Klein Neundorf; two were donated to the museum in 1905, one disappeared the day it was found, another was lost during World War II, and one remains on display in Görlitz.
“The tendency is towards a deposition,” said Smolnik, who noted archaeologists were weighing two theories: a deposition for the gods or a hiding place. In Germany, archaeological finds fall under treasure law, which treats such objects as ownerless and transfers ownership to the state upon discovery.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.