A metal detectorist in Poland has found a copper dagger more than 4,000 years old. Discovered in a woodland in Podkarpackie Voivodeship, the copper dagger is the oldest dagger found in the region.
“The dagger discovered in Korzenica can be dated to the second half of the third millennium BC,” said Dr. Marcin Burghardt, an archaeologist from the Jarosław museum.
“In the 3rd millennium BC, objects made of copper were extremely rare in these regions,” Dr. Elżbieta Sieradzka-Burghardt, an archaeologist at the same museum, told PAP.
In November last year, with the permission of the conservator of Subcarpathian monuments in Przemyśl, Piotr Gorlach of Grupa Jarosław, the History and Exploration Society, conducted a search in the forests of the Jarosław Forest District near the village of Korzenica, using a metal detector.
“I finished the search that day. On the way back to the car, out of habit, I left the detector on. At some point, the signal was heard. When I dug into the forest floor, I saw a flat metal object covered with a green patina. I quickly realized that I was dealing with something much older than the military items from the First and Second World Wars I was looking for in this area,” said Piotr Gorlach.
“In the third millennium BC, objects made of copper were extremely rare, so only those with the highest social status could afford them. There is no doubt that the dagger was not a local product.”
Dr. Burghardt-Sieradzka pointed out that it was made somewhere in the Carpathian Basin or the Ukrainian steppe. She expressed the hope that the mystery of the monument’s origin will be solved by expert metallurgical analysis in the future.
“Although the dagger from Korzenica is only 10.5 cm long, it is already a large dagger compared to other similar objects, which shows how valuable metal products were in that period.”
“It is worth noting the characteristic shape of the artifact, which resembles the flint daggers (called ploshka) used at the same time,” the archaeologist added.
Cover Photo: Łukasz Śliwiński