Rookie Metal Detectorist Unearths 2,500-Year-Old Sacrificial Artifacts, Including Bent Sword

It’s unusual to achieve something on your first try. But Claus Falsby’s successful first go at metal detecting was more than just unusual—it was nothing short of extraordinary.

The rookie metal detectorist discovered 2,500-year-old Late Bronze Age artifacts in a bog in the Danish municipality of Egedal, including a ritually bent sword and a rare necklace. The exceptional findings, announced in a statement by the Danish museum ROMU, highlight Northern Europe’s crucial transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Falsby alerted the ROMU as soon as he realized he’d (literally) hit the jackpot, according to the statement. The museum immediately sent archaeologists to investigate, who confirmed that the artifacts were part of what’s known as a “depot”—a divine or sacrificial offering. They unearthed a ritually bent sword, two small bronze axes, “ankle rings,” and a fragment of a possible clothing pin, among other things.

Believe it or not, Falsby’s second outing proved just as lucky. A few days later, he found another impressive sacrificial artifact less than 231 feet (70 meters) away from the first discovery: a large decorated bronze necklace, only the second of its kind ever unearthed in Denmark. The ROMU archaeologists dated all the artifacts, dubbed the Egedal find, to around 500 BCE, marking the region’s transition period between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.

“It’s what I would describe as a very rare find. From the early and middle part of the Bronze Age, we have a lot of these depot finds, where bronze objects turn up in the bogs,” Emil Winther Struve, an archaeologist at the ROMU, said in the statement. “But we don’t know so many from the latter part of the Bronze Age. The sacrificial tradition that has been so visible and dominant, and which is very much related to the society that existed throughout the Bronze Age, is in retreat here at the end of the Bronze Age.”

The sword—bronze with iron rivets—is an especially pertinent representation of this transition. In fact, its rivets might be the earliest known iron discovered in Denmark, according to the archaeologists. It was bent into an S-shape before being offered, allegedly for ritualistic reasons, and the researchers concluded from its design that the sword had been imported from the militant Hallstatt culture that lived just north of the Alps.

“Earlier swords were flimsy and maybe used for stabbing. But now they’re getting tougher, more solid and have a different weight, so you can use them more violently and for chopping. The Hallstatt culture, which spreads relatively quickly, has a warrior ideal and an aggressive structuring that demands conquest, war and conflict. The sword is perhaps an image of this,” Struve explained. “We don’t have many swords of this type in Denmark.” Struve and his colleagues speculated that the bronze necklace also came from abroad, specifically from the Polish coast.

The artifacts, along with previous discoveries, offer scholars a more comprehensive view of Bronze Age sacrificial traditions in what is now Denmark. Though Falsby’s discoveries represent a time of external influence in the region as well as broader change in Europe, it also indicates that the elite maintained their Bronze Age traditions well into the start of the Iron Age, according to the archaeologists. And talk about beginner’s luck!