'Extremely Rare' 4,000-Year-Old Copper Dagger Discovered in Forest

An "extremely rare" copper dagger thought to be more than 4,000 years old has been discovered by a metal detectorist in Poland.

Piotr Gorlach made the find while conducting a search with his metal detector in the forests near the village of Korzenica, Subcarpathia Province, in the southeast of the country, near the Ukrainian border, the Polish Press Agency reported.

"I'm done searching for the day. When I returned to the car, I left the detector on out of habit. At some point, there was a signal. When I was digging up the forest floor, I saw a flat metal object covered with green patina. I quickly realized that I was dealing with something much older than the military items from World War I and II that I was looking for in this area," Gorlach told PAP.

Gorlach subsequently informed archaeologists from the Orsetti House Museum in Jarosław about his find, who carried out a preliminary investigation of the artifact.

According to archaeologist Marcin Burghardt with the Jarosław museum, the dagger can be dated to the second half of the 3rd millennium B.C.

Elżbieta Sieradzka-Burghardt, another archaeologist with the museum in Jarosław, told Newsweek the artifact dates back to a period when copper objects in this part of Poland were very rare, preceding the appearance of the first items made from bronze. (Bronze is an alloy that is traditionally created by combining copper and tin.)

"The dagger can prove to be quite crucial for research on the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age in southeastern Poland," Sieradzka-Burghardt said.

The artifact is the only one of its kind ever found in Podkarpackie province and the oldest metal dagger of any type discovered there to date, according to the archaeologist.

"The only similar dagger in Poland was uncovered in the 1960s, so the new find comes as a great surprise," Sieradzka-Burghardt said.

Given that items made of copper were "extremely rare" in the 3rd millennium B.C., only those with the highest social status could afford them, the archaeologist told PAP.

The dagger is relatively soft, so it would not have been much use in combat, according to the researcher. Instead, artifacts like this were more likely intended to serve as signifiers of high social status.

While we do not have any identifying information about the individual who possessed this dagger, it most likely belonged to a warrior of "very high" social status, Sieradzka-Burghardt told Newsweek.

Due to the lack of additional finds associated with the dagger, however, archaeologists have not been able to link the artifact to a particular archaeological culture.

Nevertheless, the features of the dagger could help to shed light on its place of origin. According to Sieradzka-Burghardt, the features bear a resemblance to artifacts from two large cultural complexes: the Bell Beaker culture of western and central Europe and the Catacomb culture that inhabited parts of eastern Europe and western Asia.

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