Early Bronze Age axe mystery solved – History

The mystery of a pair of Early Bronze Age axes was solved last month when they were anonymously sent to the National Museum of Ireland. The sender has come forward to tell his story. His name is Thomas Dunn, a farmer from County Westmeath. He found the two axes while searching for a lost piece of equipment on his land.

Thomas Dunn said he stumbled across the stuff in a silage field in Banagher in late June. [grass fodder for beef cattle] One day a piece of metal fell off the mower,” he told The Irish Times.

He said: “We started looking for it then because we thought it might get into a silage harvester and break it up. So I had a guy look for it with a metal detector and that’s how we found it. It was under a row of beech trees on the side of the field; there may have been old forts on the land around here.”

At first, Dunn thought they were pieces of horse plows or other scrap metal and nearly threw them back into the ditch, but the people helping him thought they might have important archaeological value, so he decided to send them to a museum instead of throwing them into the ditch. He carefully packed them into a granola bar box and sent them anonymously, because any archaeological finds found in Ireland are the property of the state, and those who illegally search for them are severely punished.

Dunn wasn’t looking for archaeological artifacts, so he didn’t actually break the law that requires metal detector users to get written permission beforehand or risk up to three months in prison or a $70,000 fine. He just figured that discretion is the best part of courage, so he kept quiet. He didn’t learn about the artifacts’ age and function until he read about his donation in a newspaper a week later.

Archaeologists from the National Museum are currently surveying the discovery site, recording everything they can find that might shed light on the Bronze Age people who made the hand axes 4,000 years ago.