A golden bowl and hundreds of preserved Bronze Age objects in a swamp near Vienna

In Ebreichsdorf, Austria, 30 km south of Vienna, a 3,000-year-old extremely rare gold bowl of the Urnfield culture with a sun motif was discovered. It was found as part of rescue work before the planned construction of a railway station. The bowl contained other gold objects and organic remains. This is the first find of its kind in Austria.

The bowl, which is 5 cm high and 20 cm in diameter, is made of very thin gold plate, which consists of approximately 90 % gold, 5 % silver and an equal proportion of copper. It is decorated with the so-called Repoussé technique - beating on the inside for the outer raised pattern. On the sides there are rows of concentric circles, lines and dots. The bottom of the bowl is decorated with a shining sun.

The bowl included other rare artifacts: two bracelets of spiral gold wire and two clumps of organic material wrapped with gold wire. "They were probably decorative scarves, but we are not sure," said the excavation leader, Polish archaeologist Dr. Michał Sip, who considers the find to be his life's work. He believes such a gold set could have been used in religious sun worship ceremonies.

Scientists are now trying to determine where the raw materials used to make the bowl and the items inside came from. Only 30 similar finely worked Bronze Age gold bowls are known within Europe; this is the first of its kind in Austria and only the second east of the Alps. Most such wares come from northern Germany and Scandinavia, with single examples found in Spain, France and Switzerland.

Excavations at the site, which have been ongoing with the exception of a covid break since 2019, have revealed a settlement hereUrnfield culture from the Late Bronze Age (named after the way urns were buried in the fields). The settlement was active between 1300 and 1000 B.C. It consisted of several small columned structures centred around a large central building. The estimated area of the relatively large settlement, which stretched for hundreds of metres, was about 10 hectares, and about 100-150 people lived there. The bowl was found next to one of the huts.

The golden vessel and its contents may have been a votive offering. The southern edge of the settlement was then bordered by a perhaps seasonal watercourse about 25 m wide, probably a swamp most of the year. At its site, archaeologists found 500 bronze objects, including needles, knives and complete daggers, in a 2.5 m thick layer. They also found animal bones and hundreds of kilograms of pottery. The finds are hardly damaged at all, so they were not thrown away, and the eventual water course here was too shallow to be navigable, so these are not accidental losses. The density and distribution of finds suggest that they were deliberately deposited here over time.

The bowl and its contents will be exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna after conservation. In the meantime, it has been digitally scanned for a detailed 3D view.

Roman Nemec

Bronze knives discovered in a swamp

Pottery from the swamp

Needles and pins were also found in the swamp

Golden bowl

Detail of decoration

The bottom of the vessel

Completely preserved knife with handle

Gold bowl and gold wire bracelets

Bowl and its contents

From the field...

Sources: naukawpolsce.pap.pl, thehistoryblog.com, newsfounded.com