A 3500-year-old bronze dagger was found in a cornfield –

Two bronze daggers, at least 3,500 years old, were found in a corn field near Kutenholz, Germany. They are one of the oldest Bronze Age artifacts found in Lower Saxony.

Metal detective Frank Hoferichter, a collaboration with Stader regional archaeologist Daniel Nösler, has scanned the field in 2017. Hoferichter discovered the bronze fragment at that time. The debris were transferred to the University of Hamburg for protection, and in 2024 a team from the university’s former Institute of History and Archaeology searched the field with a magnetometer.

“By geomagnetic exploration, even without excavation, the archaeological structures on the ground can be seen.” Scientists have now studied these “anomalies” as part of the research excavation – successful. This is what the original dagger might look like: regional archaeologist Daniel Nösler, metal detector Frank Hoferichter and Professor Tobias Mörtz at the scene near Kutenholz.

They carefully probed the soil with shovels and trowels in four areas of the harvested cornfield and found two bronze dagger blades at a depth of only 30 cm.

One of the leaves is lying vertically in the soil and the other leaves are close to vertically. Archaeologists believe they were all stuck vertically to the ground at first, and the second one might be plowed down. Given how positive the cornfield has been tillaged by heavy machinery over the decades, it is a miracle.

Now two newly discovered blades are reunited with fragments confirmed from one of the daggers. Metallurgical analysis found that the blades and central fragments that attached it to the original handle, probably made of wood, were made of copper and tin, made of copper and tin alloys, originated in 1,500 BC in Eastern Europe, and they could have grown one foot long, including the handle.

There is no evidence that they are used as weapons, nor are there any evidence of burying at the site of discovery, so they are not serious commodities. The fact that they deliberately positioned it vertically in the soil of the hills at the highest elevation (about 100 feet) in the area shows their purpose.