3,500-year-old bronze daggers found in corn field

Two bronze daggers that are at least 3,500 years old have been discovered in a corn field near Kutenholz, Germany. They are among the oldest Bronze Age artifacts ever found in Lower Saxony.

The field had already been scanned in 2017 by metal detectorist Frank Hoferichter in collaboration with the Stader district archaeologist Daniel Nösler. Hoferichter discovered bronze fragments at that time. The fragments were transferred to the University of Hamburg for conservation, and in 2024, a team from the university’s Institute of Pre- and Early Historical Archaeology searched the field with a magnetometer.

“With geomagnetic prospecting, archaeological structures located in the ground can be visualized even without excavation,” says district archaeologist Nösler. The scientists now investigated these “anomalies” as part of a research excavation – with success.This is what the original daggers might have looked like: District archaeologist Daniel Nösler, metal detectorist Frank Hoferichter and Professor Tobias Mörtz at the site near Kutenholz.

They carefully probed the soil with a shovel and trowel in four areas of the harvested corn field and discovered the two bronze dagger blades at a depth of just 30 centimeters.

One of the blades was found lying vertically in the soil, the other at an angle near to vertical. Archaeologists think they were both originally stuck into the ground vertically and that the second was knocked askew, perhaps by a plow. It’s a miracle they weren’t completely obliterated given how actively the cornfield has been plowed with heavy machinery for decades.

The two newly-discovered blades have now been reunited with the fragments which are confirmed to have come from one of the daggers. Metallurgic analysis found that the blade and the center piece that connected it to the original handle, probably made of wood and therefore long-gone, are made of an alloy of copper and tin that originated in Eastern Central Europe no later than 1,500 B.C. They would have originally been about a foot long, including handles.

There is no evidence of them having been used as weapons, nor is there evidence of a burial at the find site, so they weren’t grave goods. The fact that they were deliberately positioned vertically in the soil of a hill with the highest elevation in the area (about 100 feet) suggests they had ceremonial purpose.