Moral: You Can Never, Really Trust a Metal Detectorist for the Details

Tertiary rocks purple

A row has broken out in Germany over an artefact found by two metal detectorists in 1999 by Henry Westphal and Mario Renner while they were illegally treasure-hunting with a metal detector but no licence. They claim they found it in the Mittelberg hillfort near Nebra in the Ziegelroda Forest, some 60 km west of Leipzig. The find was reported as a hoard in a pit with two bronze swords, two axes, a chisel, and fragments of spiral bracelets. The next (!) day, Westphal and Renner sold the entire hoard for 31,000 DM to a dealer in Cologne. and it was only recovered in February 2002, the original finders were eventually traced and led police and archaeologists to the discovery site. An excavation, as yet unpublished, took place and seemed to confirm the finders' story. Apparently the soil at the site matched soil samples found clinging to the artefacts. The two looters received jail sentences of six and twelve months. There is a tourist-attracting archaeological park on the hilltop now.

The disc was thought to have been part of the hoard and thus dated to the Early Bronze Age. Recently doubt was thrown on this interpretation. Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause, two archaeologists from Goethe University Frankfurt and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich have taken a fresh look at where and how the disk was discovered and critically examine the "vague information given by the looters" (Critical comments on the find complex of the so-called Nebra Sky Disk, in the journal Archäologische Informationen).

A critical examination of the published results by the authors does not allow the conclusion that the site investigated in a re-excavation is correct, nor that the ensemble itself fulfils the criteria of a closed find (hoard). On the contrary, according to the excavation findings the ensemble could not have been in situ at the site named. The scientific examination of the objects contradicts rather than confirm their belonging together. If the disk is considered – as required by these facts – as a single object, it cannot be integrated into the Early Bronze Age motif world. Instead, a chronological embedment in the first millennium BC seems most likely. On the basis of this overall assessment, all further conclusions and interpretations of the cultural context and the meaning of the Nebra disk that have been made so far will have to be subjected to a critical discussion.

At the end of the (preprint) text, the authors describe a number of problems they had with the German archaeological establishment getting their critical study published...  

Rather weirdly, just after that went online on 3rd September was a response (published anonymously!) from the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt: "Himmelsscheibe von Nebra eisenzeitlich? Eine Richtigstellung/ Sky disc of Nebra dated into the Iron Age? A corrective statement". This is really dotty, and one wonders what lies behind this.

The colleagues not only ignore the abundance of published research results in recent years, their various arguments also are easily refuted.

Well, Landesamt, get the results of the confirmatory excavations published for a start.  And I think if you are going to "easily refute" the reasoning, it is best properly to acquaint yourself with it first. Landesamt goes on: 

Claims are that the soil attachments on the Sky Disc do not correspond with those of the other findings and that the geochemical analyses of the metals do not support their coherence. Both of these statements are demonstrably incorrect. According to an essay by Dr. Jörg Adam (then State Office of Criminal Investigation of Brandenburg), who conducted the investigations of the soil attachments for the Regional Court of Halle as an expert, and who was not quoted by the two authors...

Wass? Landesamt has not read the text above, which actually refers to that report prepared for a court. They give a link to it, and you decide if those soils are the same and can only locate the findspot to a single small hole on a huge hilltop at the southern end of a hill complex 15x7km in a particular region of Germany (bear in mind how much of Germany overlies Tertiary rocks). Note, only six control samples were taken from just three localities (Suhl, Hainspitz and three samples from Hettstedt). As for the metal analysis, the significance of the analysis of copper production in Mitterberg in the Salzburg region that shows it "ended at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC" (so allegedly the Sky Disc could not have been made later) depends on what the Sky Disc was made from.  Landesamt (using the royal 'we') says: 

Due to lack of space, we refrain from discussing the many other inconsistencies in the content of the article here. 

Well, as  Rupert Gebhard and Rüdiger Krause said, all further conclusions and interpretations of the cultural context and the meaning of the Nebra disk that have been made so far will have to be subjected to a critical discussion. Let's now see it. Let us see it start with a discussion of whether metal detectorists are cognitively equipped to make the kind of observations and record of the details of archaeological context that is the basis of this dispute. It is their word here against some evidence that throws their account into doubt. Because at the moment, this dispute suggests that the only record available are several court depositions of a criminal case that took place more than three years after the discovery. Let us find out where the metal detectorists and their associates had been digging earlier and see soil samples from those sites given the same analysis to help falsify the theory that the objects were not originally found together at x-marks-the-spot on Mittleberg bei Nebra.