New and rediscovered tanged daggers with ring-shaped handle tip

The spread of a Late Bronze Age innovation in Central Europe

Abstract

The paper presents a Late Bronze Age bronze tanged dagger with a ring-shaped handle tip, which was discovered during an excavation in Süttő-Sáncföldek (Hungary) in 2018. The intact object was found inside a large feature of unknown function together with some other bronze items and hundreds of ceramic, stone and bone fragments. The material can be dated to the period of the Late Tumulus and Early Urnfield cultures. Similar daggers from Europe have been collected and their typology has been revisited in the article. They are known mainly from Moravia and the Carpathian Basin. In particular, the innovation of adding a ring at the end of the daggers has been investigated, together with the distribution of other artifacts sharing the same feature. It has been pointed out that although the tanged daggers with ring were produced in separate workshops, they reflect on an intensive cultural interaction between the Eastern Alps, Moravia and the inner territories of the Carpathian Basin during the Br D and Ha A1 periods.