A Bronze Age hoard comprising 35 pounds of bronze in 310 objects has been discovered in the Klein Neundorf suburb of Görlitz in eastern Germany. Dating to the 9th century B.C., it is the largest Bronze Age hoard ever found in Upper Lusatia and the second-largest in all of Saxony.

Bronze Age objects had been found at the site since 1900, when children harvesting potatoes stumbled on three bronze daggers. One of them was lost soon after the discovery; the two remaining ones were acquired by the Görlitz Museum in 1905. One of the surviving pair was lost in the chaos of World War II, so of the original three daggers, only one remains. The children’s father donated a socketed axe to the museum two years later.

The objects had been in the museum collection for more than a century when Dr. Jasper von Richthofen, the director of the Görlitz Collections, hatched a plan to excavate the find site for the first time in August of 2023, with the collaboration of the Saxon State Office for Archaeology and volunteer metal detectorists. It was one of the metal detectorists who made the initial breakthrough, finding bronze sickle fragments on the western edge of the exploration area. The rest of the team joined in and more objects were discovered in the plow zone. In total, 108 objects from the hoard were discovered that had been scattered by plowing activity.

Finally, several objects were found clustered together in one place. They were the surface of the original deposition, what was left in place when the artifacts at the top were scattered by plows. The rest of the hoard was still intact in its burial site and was removed in a soil block for excavation in the restoration laboratory of the Saxon State Office for Archaeology.

Excavation took place from September 2023 through the end of April 2024. The objects in the hoard include tools, weapons, jewelry, garment fittings and raw metal ingots known as cast cakes. The most of any single object found thus far is sickles; there are 136 sickles in the hoard. The runner-up is axes. There are 50 of them. Photogrammetric pictures were taken at every stage of the excavation so that a 3D model of the hoard could be created that will allow researchers to study artifacts in their original positions and relative to each other.

Special features include a sword broken into four pieces and a brooch of the Spindlersfeld type, named after a site near Berlin. Of the four fractures in the sword, two are demonstrably old, indicating that the weapon was deposited in a broken state. When put together, the sword has a total length of 44 cm, making it strikingly short. The pommel consisted of two sheet metal shells between which a disc of organic material, possibly bone or ivory, was attached. Further analyses will shed light on this. Although the sword is typologically unique, experts suspect that it originates from southern Germany.

All of the artifacts are now being scientifically analyzed and conserved for future exhibition.