Entire Country in Awe After Pup Digs Up Treasure Trove of Priceless Relics
We all know that dogs have a tendency to dig up odd stuff, right? Well, as a kid, I had to take that axiom on faith, because I had a cranky cat rather than a kind canine.
Still, Calico would drag home all sorts of gory gifts such as lizards and mice. She even brought back a dead rabbit once.
For all that, though, my kitty was an ordinary specimen, only sussing out ordinary things. The same can’t be said for a Czech dog named Monty.
According to Radio Praha, a man only identified as Mr. Frankota was walking his dog through a field this past March. The pair was strolling through the Orlické Mountains, an area in the northeast section of the Czech Republic.
Suddenly, Monty started scrabbling in the dirt. That must not have been all that surprising to Frankota.
Perhaps he thought that his pooch had encountered a long-dead animal or maybe even a particularly tasty bone. Yet when he looked in the hole Monty was digging, he saw something completely unexpected.
In the now loose dirt, small regularly shaped objects had begun to appear. They were made of metal and shaped a little like tiny sickles.
Frankota couldn’t have known it at the time, but Monty had just unearthed a Bronze Age treasure trove. Forget Indiana Jones: The individual who would make sure the finding ended up in a museum was a dog.
Somehow Frankota got in touch with Martina Beková. An archaeologist with the Museum and Gallery of Orlické Mountains, she soon had a team at the area to investigate.
Smithsonian Magazine reported that Monty had dug up “13 sickles, two spear points, three axes and several bracelets.” The relics came from an era known as the Urnfield period.
That name means pretty much what it sounds like. Some 3,000 years ago, individuals in the area started cremating their dead rather than burying them in trenches.
They stored the remains of the deceased in (you guessed it) urns, which they then buried in fields. Hence the name.
The most amazing part of Monty’s find was that the browser discovered it at all. According to Beková, the people of the Urnfield period didn’t typically bury large caches of goods.
Rather, they’d only stick broken and busted stuff in the ground. “The fact that there are so many objects in one place is almost certainly tied to an act of honoration, most likely a sacrifice of some sorts,” she said.
“What particularly surprised us was that the objects were whole, because the culture that lived here at the time normally just buried fragments, often melted as well. These objects are beautiful, but the fact that they are complete and in good condition is of much more value to us.”
The Hradec Králové Region gave Frankota a reward of approximately $360 for the find. Here’s to hoping he spent a little of it on tasty treats for old Monty.
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