Mystery of Early Bronze Age axeheads solved

The mystery of the pair of Early Bronze Age axeheads that were mailed anonymously to the National Museum of Ireland last month has been solved. The sender has come forward to tell his story. His name is Thomas Dunne, and he’s a farmer from County Westmeath. He found the axes on his land while looking for a lost piece of equipment.

Thomas Dunne said he had found the items by chance on his silage field at Banagher at the end of June. “I was cutting silage [grass fodder for beef cattle] one day and a bit of metal fell off a mower,” he told the Irish Times.

He said: “We started looking for it then because we thought it might go into the silage harvester and break it up. So, I got a man with a metal detector to look for it and that’s how it was found. It was in the side of a field underneath a row of beech trees; there would have been ancient forts on the land around here.”

At first Dunne thought they were horse plough fragments or some other kind of scrap metal and almost tossed them back in the ditch, but the person who was helping him out thought they might be archaeologically significant, so he decided to send them to the museum instead of throwing them in a ditch. He packed them up carefully in a oat bar box and send them anonymously because any archaeological finds made in Ireland are property of the state, and there are serious penalties for people who illicitly seek them out.

Dunne was not looking for archaeological objects, so he wasn’t actually breaking the law that requires written prior permission for metal detectorists or risk a large penalty of up to three months in prison or a $70,000 fine. He just figured discretion was the better part of valour and kept mum. He only found out their age and function when he read about his donation in the newspapers a week later.

National Museum archaeologists are now surveying the find site, logging everything they can find that might shed light on the Bronze Age people who created the handaxes 4,000 years ago.

* This article was originally published here