– credit, Museum of the History of Kamień Land

On a beach in Northern Poland, buried treasure has been found.

A beautiful, intricately inlaid dagger from the Bronze Age, perhaps once used in ceremony by a “solar cult” was dug up by a pair of metal detectives from the area.

Jacek Ulkowski and Katarzyna Herdzik immediately notified authorities at the Museum of the History of Kamien Land, whose director, archaeologist Grzegorz Kurka, met the duo at the beach to examine the artifact.

Jacek Ukowski and Katarzyna Herdzik, the metal detectives who discovered the dagger – credit, Museum of the History of Kamień Land

“A true work of art,” Kurka tells the Polish Press Agency. “I have not seen such a dagger in my experience with findings in Polish territories.”

In a statement released by the museum, the find was called “a true masterpiece of metallurgy,” with a blade approximately 10 inches long covered in “linear crescent moons and crosses resembling stars.”

Ulkowski and Herdzik went to the beach following a storm, knowing that artifacts can be disturbed from their sandy tombs under the rough seas. As it happened, they actually found it embedded in a layer of clay that had become dislodged from a nearby cliff face.

Perhaps dating to around 500 BCE, the dagger is likely connected to the Hallstatt Culture, arguably the most significant central European society during the Bronze Age. The Hallstatt heartland spanned an area between Switzerland, France, Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, but Hallstatt “type” settlements have also been identified as far east as Serbia and Bulgaria, and as far north as Poland.

A catalogue of Hallstatt Culture discoveries – credit Bibliographic Institute of Leipzig

Surface decorations may indicate connections to a solar cult and suggest that the dagger had a ritual significance, a statement from the museum read.

“It could also have been equipped with a rich warrior. This dagger is undoubtedly a true work of art and an example of a high level of metallurgy.”

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The museum also hypothesized that the dagger could have been cast in the way daggers were made in Greece for example, and imported from southern Europe.

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