A metal detectorist recently discovered not one, but two bronze and wood daggers that experts dated to over 3,000 years ago.
Only the bronze portions of the instruments survived for so long buried in a German field.
Scholars believe the daggers weren’t used as weapons, but rather were ritual offerings.
Two bronze-bladed daggers over 3,000 years old were recently found buried—but, curiously, standing upright—in a field in northern Germany. As it turns out, that positioning would tell experts plenty about these blades, which very well may have never seen battle.
Initially, a metal detectorist discovered fragments of metal blades when searching a field near Kutenholz in the German district of Stade in 2017. But it wasn’t until 2024 that archaeologists took a closer look at the area, which led to the discovery of Bronze Age weapons: two daggers made of—you guessed it—bronze (which is a mix of copper and tin).
“One of the blades was stuck vertically in the ground, the other was also almost vertically in the sand, possibly hit by a plow,” Daniel Nösler, and archaeologist from the Stade District, said in a translated statement.
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To find the blades, a team from the University of Hamburg searched the area with geomagnetic devices and then probed the soil with a shovel in four areas of a harvested cornfield until they found the daggers burried just over a foot deep in the soil. The team said it was pure coincidence that the blades were never destroyed by the heavy agricultural equipment that routinely plowed the area.
Closer examination of the two daggers by university experts showed that the handles were likely made of wood, though they were (unsurprisingly) not preserved over the last three millennia. The bronze used to craft the blades comes from roughly 1500 B.C., and was most likely sourced from somewhere in Eastern-Central Europe. The experts studying the daggers believe the entire blade was about the length of a person’s forearm.
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Tobias Mörtz, archaeologist at the University of Hamburg, said in a statement that the daggers were likely more ceremonial and cultural than aggressive weaponry. Due to both the orientation of the blades—buried vertically in the soil at the highest elevation in Kutenholz, which is about 92 feet high—and to the archaeologists finding no traces of burials in the area, they concluded that the daggers not used as funerary goods or as weapons.
Instead, the scholars believe the daggers were intentionally set in their places as a sort of offering. The offering’s intent is unknown, but those involved in the discovery are surely happy to find it nonetheless, over 3,000 years later.
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Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.