Czech Man's Stone in Barn's Foundations Is Rare Bronze Age Spearhead Mold

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-czech-man-used-this-stone-in-his-barns-foundations-it-turned-out-to-be-rare-bronze-age-spearhead-mold-180988339/

by bookofjoe • 4 months ago

84 42 4 months ago

smithsonianmag.com

gedy2• 4 months ago

Interesting topic, but so sad to see the Smithsonian blanketed in tacky popups and scrolling ad banners, yikes

Mistletoe• 4 months ago

The Smithsonian Institution endowment is a roughly $2.6 billion investment portfolio (as of 2024) that provides permanent, private financial support for its museums, research, and educational programs. It acts as a crucial supplement to federal funding, investing in diversified assets like stocks, bonds, and private equity to generate annual payouts, which generally support staff positions

I guess $2.6B isn’t enough in the late stage capitalism era to stave off tacky.

ggm3• 4 months ago

Hate to be a party pooper but what kind of income do you beleive is sustaining for a national museum with extensive archives, repositories, conservation costs and ongoing collection needs, quite apart from simple building maintenance, outreach and staffing?

$2.6b generates at best of the order $200m in usable funds. I would be amazed if that is even remotely close to the operating costs of an institution like this.

sandworm1012• 4 months ago

Funny, i didnt see any ads or popups. Horray for adblockers!

fransje263• 4 months ago

In this day and age, who on HN browses the web without an ad-blocker??

gedy2• 4 months ago

I am using blockers! I appreciate my plugins and/or adblock home could have some issue, but point stands about the Smithsonian.

bookofjoe6• 4 months ago

I do. Never have used an ad blocker and never will.

pwg• 4 months ago

Browsing with Ublock Origin blocking all of the javascript resulted in the article appearing, but zero ads.

herewulf• 4 months ago

While that is indeed sad, you owe it to yourself to install Firefox (Android?) with uBlock Origin. With that setup, I'm not seeing any of that junk.

twooclock• 4 months ago

Now find the spearehed, please!

Is it possible? What are the chances? Was bronze age production heigh enough?

inglor_cz3• 4 months ago

Most ancient metalwork got recycled again and again, so while there is a chance, it would be pure luck.

BTW if you visit some archeological museum, the difference between Stone Age tools and Bronze Age tools is quite striking. In the Stone Age, each tool looks different, while by the Bronze Age, the spearheads etc. are so uniform that they could have been produced in a modern factory.

card_zero2• 4 months ago

Yes and no. Here's a pile of 19 polished stone axes:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Malone_hoard.JPG

They're admittedly different sizes, but the intent to churn them out is clear. These things were ambiguously tools or currency: they were transported long distances and hoarded.

There was another, older, stone age industrial site in France that produced thousands of beads. The way I remember it*, there was evidence that they fed themselves by trading beads for food. It's interesting to me that a stone age lifestyle might for some people resemble factory work.

*My apologies if I'm confabulating this. I think it was in the Loire Valley. I need to track down what exactly I'm half-remembering here.

OJFord• 4 months ago

Bound the halves with copper wire! I always end up with more questions than answers on these things, how was the wire made? I suppose if I'd thought about it, clearly they could do wire for jewellery.

Never ceases to impress me how long ago we were capable of such ornate manufacturing really—most of the time I think progress has been wildly more rapid over the last century or so, and it has in some ways, but in others we're still just doing things we've been doing for millennia.

card_zero2• 4 months ago

I was thinking about how they did the hollow part. The mold needs a carefully centered stopper where the shaft goes. Some sort of jig of wires to keep it in place.

rnewme• 4 months ago

There's index hole on the bottom, you can see it running across. See more Stone Moulds from Terramare (Northern Italy): Analytical Approach and Experimental Reproduction Persistent Identifier https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10145

Fig 11. Ophiolite multiple mould for razor and spear-head.

sandworm1012• 4 months ago

It wouldnt have looked or felt like wire. It wouldnt be very round. Hammer a thin plate then slice a spiral with an obsidian knife. You wont by making knots with it, just wrapping it around molds. But i would think that wet cord or sinew would have worked just as well. Or they could put the mold in the ground, letting packed dirt keep the two halfs together.

jrrv2• 4 months ago

Such an interesting artefact just sat under some guy's barn... can't help but wonder how many more items like this there are out there, and how many of them we'll never find before they're accidentally destroyed.

em-bee3• 4 months ago

aren't most such artifacts found by starting to dig somewhere? how many artifacts remain buried because you just start building on top without looking what's in the ground? almost every village or city in europe has a history going back millennium or more, burying countless interesting artifacts. many of which probably have already been destroyed in the process.

to find new artifacts the best hope is to look for historical sites that have not been built over already. what i find interesting here is that now with aerial and satellite images and AI search we are able to detect such sites even when they would otherwise be unnoticed by the human eye.

inglor_cz3• 4 months ago

There is a lot of stuff underground, especially in the regions that have been settled by humans in the first millennia of agriculture.

My favorite in Czechia was a married pair that decided to build their family house on a plot not far from the Southern Moravian city of Znojmo (2007). They started digging the foundations ...

... and found out that their future home is going to be located in the outer zone of a huge necropolis from the 8th and 9th century. Several hundred silent neighbours at the least.

xtiansimon• 4 months ago

This website is unusable on mobile.

bookofjoe6• 4 months ago

For you.

Here are two screenshots of the website taken a moment ago on iPhone 15 Pro Max:

https://imgur.com/a/fRyE2ha

Czech Man's Stone in Barn's Foundations Is Rare Bronze Age Spearhead Mold

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