3,500-Year-Old Bronze Treasure Unearthed in Poland

SANOK, POLAND—A collection of bronze items that had been hidden in a clay jug and buried upside down on a piece of sandstone 3,500 years ago has been unearthed in the Bieszczady Mountains by a team from the Historical Museum in Sanok. The scientists had been alerted to the cache by a hiker who had spotted an ice ax sticking out of the ground. “The treasure contains a pickaxe, dozens of fragments of a spiral necklace and a bracelet with recurring endings,” Piotr Kotowicz of the Historical Museum in Sanok told Science & Scholarship in Poland. He thinks that the objects were probably made south of the Carpathian Mountains. “The treasure is probably related to the communication route, which ran from the nearby Lupkow Pass through the Oslawa and San valleys,” he said. Plans are being made to look for a settlement in the area surrounding the cache.