Archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age burial mound in the town of Nördlingen in Bavaria have discovered an exceptionally well preserved Achtkantschwert Sword, according to a press release issued by the Bayerisches Landesamt fur Denkmal Pflege on 14 June 2023. Swords of this type have a bronze blade with an octagonal hilt, also made from bronze, cast directly over the blade (a process known as overlay casting). In this example the hilt was further secured to the blade with four rivets, two of which remain. The sword hilt was further embossed and inlayed with decoration. The sword is almost totally uncorroded, and shows no marks associated with use (this may be connected, physical impacts to metal objects can create positively and negatively charged areas, leading them to corrode more easily, in the same way that batteries corrode much faster than other metal items), but is thought to have been a real weapon intended for use in combat, with a blade weighted towards its tip, which implies use as a slashing weapon.
The tomb is burial mound is thought to date from the Middle Bronze Age, around the end of the fourteenth century BC, and contains the remains of a man, a woman, and an adolescent of (as yet) undetermined sex, buried either together or in rapid succession, and has produced a rich selection of bronze grave goods. The inclusion of a sword in such a grave is unusual, with the practice of burying weapons with the dead having largely ended in the nineteenth century BC in the region. Most swords known from this period are scattered surface finds, probably lost during conflict.
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