Iron Age ritual activity has been discovered at the Bruchhauser Steine, a prominent rock formation in the hilly Sauerland region of western Germany. It is a major landmark in the landscape and was capped by an Iron Age hillfort dated between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. In 2025 a metal detectorist came across two iron axes positioned with their blades at right angles to each other. They were in top soil on the Feldstein – the highest rock at the top of the Bruchhauser Steine. The iron blades had been deposited with their wooden shafts intact and were already old when laid down. Possibly in a closure ceremony. The reason for saying that is that the axes were placed on top of a cavity where quartz had been extracted from the rock. Inside the cavity the Iron Age people had left a stone slab and a hammerstone. These had been used to crush the extracted quartz.
The quartz could have been mined much more easily at the base of the rock which indicates the summit had special significance. It was closer to the sky and had a wide panorama over the surrounding landscape. Ground quartz was used to add to clay in order to improve the quality and strength, and heat resistance. Iron Age pottery did not crumble in the same way as Neolithic pottery. Archaeologist Manuel Zeiler suggested quartz gathered at the summit, a difficult location in which to work, may been used in pottery vessels created for ritual purposes. What did the iron axes signify? The story comes from Current World Archaeology 137 June 2026. See https://www.world-archaeology.com … and the same is true of the next story a few pages later. An axe like object was found in a sacrificial pit at a Bronze Age site in SW China. It was made from iron from a meteor. The site was occupied between 2800 and 600BC. Researchers suggest the axe like object had a symbolic significance – see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2026.100692 … from where the story was extracted.