Grand Pressigny Flint Dagger @museum.de

F: February 1965. A bulldozer was at work in a sandpit near Bruchsal. Nothing unusual about that. But then a "strange" object came to light: barely 24 centimetres long, three centimetres wide – and odd-looking. The object was honey yellow in colour with purplish-brown spots and had a waxy patina.

M2: At first, the man who found it was at a loss, but then he gave in to human nature – in this case, his curiosity. And so he tested the "thing" on an iron rail. Whereupon a four-centimetre chunk of the tip broke off. Apart from that, the experiment yielded little in the way of insights.

F: What those who discovered the object couldn't have known at the time was that their find was unique. It's a dagger made of flint. Fortunately, someone later managed to reattach the broken tip.

M: The flint, and that's what makes it so special, comes from Le Grand-Pressigny, a small community about 300 kilometres southwest of Paris. Some 4,000 years ago, an important quarry there produced especially high-quality flint.

F: Blanks (or unworked chunks) of Grand-Pressigny flint are big and yellow. Since they resemble a big slab of butter in shape and colour, they are sometimes called "livre de beurre", or "pound of butter". This raw material was particularly suited to making long blades and daggers. Such artefacts have been found in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and, of course, here in Bruchsal.

M: Presumably the dagger found its way here with the people of the Bell Beaker Culture. That culture owes its rather cumbersome name to the distinctive shape of its pottery, which looks like a bell. We have two such bell beakers on display in the glass case. The people of the Bell Beaker Culture lived more than 4,000 years ago, just as the Neolithic period was being succeeded by the Bronze Age. They didn't have a continuous settlement area, but were scattered across the whole of Europe in small individual groups.