More than two millennia ago, a ship carrying a wealth of iron sank in the Danube River in what is now Austria. Archaeologists have identified the "rusty treasure" as a collection of 500 iron bars — the largest cache of ancient iron ever discovered in Europe and enough metal to equip an army.
The assortment was discovered in 2019, when workers who were extracting gravel from the river near the village of Deinham spotted a few unusual double-pointed iron objects and reported them to the Austrian monument authority.
"It is nothing short of a minor miracle that the largest mass find of prehistoric iron bars in Europe did not end up at scrap dealers," Peter Trebsche, an archaeologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said in a statement.
In a study published Monday (Sept. 21) in the journal Antiquity, Trebsche and co-author Marion Berranger, an archaeologist at the University of...
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