Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (6.1988/1991)

THE AGRICULTURAL TOOLS
OF BOHEMIA
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE IRON AGE (5TH-3RD CENTURY BC)
By
Magdalena Beranovd

It has been believed until quite recently that
new agricultural implements of iron, first and
foremost, ard-shares, markedly curved sick-
les and grass scythes became popular in Cen-
tral Europe in general and in the lands of Bo-
hemia in particular in the Late and Final La
lene periods, i.e. from the end of the 2nd
century BC up to the turn of the era. How-
ever, new archaeological finds from Bohemia
and in connection with them, more thorough
examination of earlier evidence, do bear out
the crucial importance of the Late Hallstatt
and Early La Tene periods (5th-3rd century
BC) as an epoch of transition.
The ploughing implements
In the course of excavation of the Ledce
settlement site, district of Kladno, V. Moucha
found two small, narrow ard-shares of iron in
a feature with Braubach-type pottery of the
5th-4th centuries BC. The first of them is 17.5
cm long and 5 cm wide and completely pre-
served - it might, in fact, never have been in
use (Fig. 1:1). The other item, 11.5 cm long, is
incomplete: part of the upper half and of the
lobes are missing and the point might have
been adjusted and shortened by a secondary
operation (Fig. 1:2). An ard-ploughshare
from the site of Hostomice district of Teplice,
found by P. Budinsky (1971) in a feature dat-
ing to the later phase of this site (its earlier


Fig. 1. Ledce, ard-shares No. 1 and 2, 5th-4th cen-
tury BC. □ Ledce, Hakenpflugscharen 1 und 2;
5.-4. Jh. v.Chr.