The Sundarban 
Archaeologists chanced on this Celtic trepanation tool in Poland.
(Image credit: Bartłomiej Kaczyński)
Archaeologists in Poland gain chanced on a rare iron tool that the Celts used to perform cranial surgery 2,300 years ago.
The handheld artifact used to be found at Łysa Góra, a Celtic put in the Mazovia status of central-jap Poland.
“The technique and precision of the iron object’s manufacture indicate Celtic metallurgy,” Bartłomiej Kaczyński, an archaeologist at the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, informed Dwell Science in an email, and it used to be likely used to trepan a human skull.
From the Greek notice meaning “to bore,” trepanation is a form of cranial surgery that used to be practiced in many cultures across the arena — including in what are now Spain, Israel and Bolivia — for at least 5,000 years, till the beginning of the Nineteenth century.
There are about a trepanation systems, however most Celts appear to gain used the “traditional scraping technique of trepanation,” and handiest a minority of Celtic settlements practiced “drill trepanations,” according to a 2007 watch in the journal Neurosurgical Point of interest.
“The Celts practiced trepanation, as indicated by individual tools discovered in graves,” Kaczyński acknowledged. “It seems that these operations had not only a magical but also a medical purpose.”
Nonetheless to this point, they gain found no skeletons of those that underwent the plot at Łysa Góra.
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The presence of Celts — fierce warriors who had been native to the European mainland and sacked Rome — used to be somewhat surprising, the crew acknowledged, since Łysa Góra is the most northeastern Celtic put ever found in Europe.
Kaczyński and his crew had been conducting unusual archaeological digs at Łysa Góra, which used to be first excavated in the Nineteen Seventies, for two years.
In 2024, the archaeologists found hundreds of artifacts, including a rare Celtic helmet fabricated from thin bronze sheet steel. And in the 2025 excavation, the crew found Celtic brooches, a spearhead and an iron ax, as smartly as a colossal desire of steel objects related to horseback riding.
The trepanation tool, chanced on this spring in the related phase of the put because the helmet, is even rarer than the helmet, according to Kaczyński, because handiest about a of these surgical tools had been found at Celtic internet sites. This explicit implement, which features a blade that transitions to a spike and used to be perhaps originally mounted to a wood maintain, is a kind of outdated scalpel.
Kaczyński informed Science in Poland that the presence of an iron trepanation scalpel design that the Celts who settled in the status likely included any individual with in truth professional medical or ritual information, as smartly as a blacksmith who would perhaps perchance create the tools found at Łysa Góra.
The excavations at Łysa Góra gain to this point published that it used to be a fortified settlement even before the Celts arrived in the fourth century. Nonetheless as soon as the Celts arrived, “traces of bronze and iron metallurgy, extraordinary imports, fragmented bronze and amber objects all indicate that the settlement was a key center of trade,” Kaczyński acknowledged.
Amber used to be a prized material in the Mediterranean world at this time, Kaczyński informed Dwell Science in 2024, and the Celts will gain fortified Łysa Góra to guard their put on the “amber trail.”
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Kristina Killgrove is a workers author at Dwell Science with a highlight on archaeology and paleoanthropology information. Her articles gain also seemed in venues corresponding to Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Kristina holds a Ph.D. in natural anthropology and an M.A. in classical archaeology from the College of North Carolina, as smartly as a B.A. in Latin from the College of Virginia, and she or he used to be formerly a college professor and researcher. She has got awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing.
