Qualla: Eberswalde Hoard

Eberswalde Hoard: Introduction

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bildarbeiter, CC BY 4.0. They were digging a house foundation in the yard of a brass works when the spades struck clay. A metre down, on 16 May 1913, workmen at the Messingwerk in Finow — a factory settlement on the edge of Eberswalde, northeast of Berlin — uncovered a lidded pot. Inside were eight gold bowls, and inside those, seventy-three more gold objects: neck rings, bracelets, sixty spiralled wire arm-rings, an ingot, a lump of metal shaped like a crucible. Eighty-one pieces in all, 2.59 kilograms of gold, buried in the ninth century BC and undisturbed for something like 2,800 years. It remains the largest prehistoric assembly of gold objects ever found in Germany. It has not been in Germany since 1945.

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Image: Bildarbeiter | CC BY 4.0

Eberswalde Hoard: Eight Bowls, Nested

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The bowls are why archaeologists rank this find where they do. They are thin-walled and chased — worked from behind with punches so the ornament stands out in relief on the outer face — and covered edge to edge in decoration of a kind that turns up across Bronze Age Europe. The s...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Eberswalde Hoard: Merchant's Stock or Offering?

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0. For most of the twentieth century the standard reading was commercial: a trader's stock, buried for safekeeping by someone who never came back for it. The mixture of finished ornaments and raw metal fitted that story neatly enough. More recent scholarship leans the other way, to...

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Image: Didier Descouens | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eberswalde Hoard: 1945

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. Carl Schuchhardt, who directed the Prehistoric Department of the Royal Museums in Berlin, was alerted by the factory supervisor and brought the hoard into the Berlin collection almost immediately. He published it the following year as 'Der Goldfund vom Messingwerk bei Eberswalde....

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eberswalde Hoard: Two Legal Systems, One Pot of Gold

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. The dispute since has been a standoff between two positions, each internally consistent. Germany argues the hoard is stolen cultural property and asks for its return. Russia points to a federal law signed on 15 April 1998 — passed over Yeltsin's veto — which declares cultural val...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0