Rare Iron Age Jewellery and Knife Found in Prehistoric Grave

An Iron Age grave found in Austria has been found to contain a number of treasures, including bronze jewelry, as well as, surprisingly, the remnants of textiles.

It was also discovered that the body within the grave had been cremated prior to burial in what is today the village of Hallstat, around 170 miles from Vienna.

"It is not only the good state of preservation of the costumes and pieces of jewelry that were placed in the grave that is remarkable," Johann Rudorfer, a research associate in the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum Vienna said in a statement. "But also the fact that we were able to identify a clearly recognizable burial pit inspires us. The area was extensively archaeologically investigated in the 19th century, but little attention was paid to certain details, such as the grave construction."

Within the grave, the archaeologists found a large, ribbed, bronze arm ring, thought to have been worn on the upper arm, as well as three spiral-shaped bronze discs. These items led researchers to think that the body may have been that of a woman, but they will find out for sure after analyzing bone fragments further.

They also found animal bones, thought to be food for the afterlife, a bronze knife blade, and a piece of sheet iron, possibly from a belt fitting. All of the items appeared to have been deliberately bent or broken.

"Perhaps it was thought appropriate to ritually destroy the grave goods in order to be able to use them as grave goods, because the body was also 'destroyed' by the burning," Rudorfer, head of the research excavations, said in an NHM broadcast on Wednesday, as reported by Vienna Online.

Remnants of textiles were also found, which is unusual for a grave that may be 3,000 years old. On the underside of the spiral discs, the archaeologists found imprints of fabric, which had been transformed over the years into an inorganic substance, but still held the fingerprint structure of having once been textile.

The archaeologists theorized that the fabric may have been part of a container that the burned remains were placed inside before the burial. This backs up previous assumptions that cremated bodies had been buried inside a cloth bag or container, not previously found because of the lack of preservation of textiles.

"Usually we only find a heap with the small bones and some ash, but it is so compact that we always suspected small sacks made of fabric or leather. Now the evidence for this has probably been provided," Rudorfer said in the statement.

The grave is thought to date from between 800 and 550 B.C., in the early Iron Age. Hallstatt is home to a number of graves and artifacts from this period, leading to the span of history from which they came being named the "Hallstatt period." Over 1,000 graves from this era were excavated in this region in the late 1800s, with a total of around 1,500 having been discovered to date. Some estimate that there may be as many as 5,000 graves in the area.

"So we now know that the old excavations probably did not include all of the grave finds," Rudorfer said. "The handling of finds that were not transported to museum facilities is also made clear by further stray finds and individual piles of human bones that originate from body burials. According to the graphic documentation, these were taken from the graves in order to deposit them in the ground in their immediate vicinity."

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