The Mystery of the Bronze Age Ax Heads Mailed Anonymously to an Irish Museum Has Been Solved

Earlier this year, the National Museum of Ireland received a package containing two Bronze Age ax heads inside a flapjack box. Hoping to learn more about the artifacts, museum officials urged the anonymous sender to come forward.

Now, several months later, the mystery has been solved: The 4,000-year-old artifacts had been unearthed in a field in Westmeath, a county in central Ireland.

The field’s owner is a farmer named Thomas Dunne, who didn’t learn about the buzz surrounding the artifacts until “after it had already been in the news for a week,” as he tells the Westmeath Examiner’s Robert Kindregan.

Dunne came across the ax heads earlier this summer. He was cutting silage—harvesting grass for livestock feed—on his farm in the parish of Killucan when “I felt a piece of steel come off the mower,” he tells the Irish broadcaster RTÉ News.

“We were afraid it would go into something else, so we got a man with a metal detector to go and look for it,” he says. “He found [the ax heads] under a row of beech trees. We thought they were just bits of old horse plows or scrap. We could have thrown them back into the ditch the very same!”

The metal detectorist thought the objects were unusual and decided to mail them to the National Museum of Ireland. It wasn’t until the museum received the artifacts, determined they were made in the Bronze Age and put out a call for information that Dunne realized the ax heads were the very “scraps” he ran over with his mower.

Museum experts were baffled when the flat metal tools arrived in the mail. They identified them as ax heads dating to between 2150 and 2000 B.C.E., a few hundred years after the early Bronze Age began in Ireland. However, they needed more information.

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“We are thrilled about the discovery of these early Bronze Age ax heads, but to truly understand their significance, we need to know where they were found,” said Matt Seaver, the museum’s assistant keeper of Irish antiquities, in a July statement. “An object on its own is valuable in one sense, but an object in its context tells us something about where and why these objects were used.”

Now, researchers have their desired context. As local historian Ruth Illingworth, a tour guide in Westmeath, tells the Westmeath Examiner, the axes would have been “very high-tech” at the time they were made.

“They were state of the art, and I think the metal workers who crafted them would have been seen as magicians by others,” she adds. “The people who made those axes would have been very much part of the elite. … It’s an amazing, beautiful piece of workmanship.”

Irish law prohibits searching for archaeological objects with a metal detector without written permission from the government, per BBC News’ Eimear Flanagan. The identity of the metal detectorist who assisted Dunne has not been revealed.

As the farmer tells RTÉ News, he’s never encountered anything like this in his field before, and he’s been cutting silage in the same area for more than three decades.

“It’s just an ordinary green field; there are no monuments or anything else around it,” says Dunne. “I couldn’t believe that [the ax heads] came out of my field.”

Editor’s note, August 9, 2024: This story has been updated to clarify that the ax heads were mailed in a flapjack box (which originally held oat-based cereal bars), rather than a pancake box.

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.