Such an interesting artefact just sat under some guy's barn... can't help but wonder how many more items like this there are out there, and how many of them we'll never find before they're accidentally destroyed.
aren't most such artifacts found by starting to dig somewhere? how many artifacts remain buried because you just start building on top without looking what's in the ground? almost every village or city in europe has a history going back millennium or more, burying countless interesting artifacts. many of which probably have already been destroyed in the process.
to find new artifacts the best hope is to look for historical sites that have not been built over already. what i find interesting here is that now with aerial and satellite images and AI search we are able to detect such sites even when they would otherwise be unnoticed by the human eye.
There is a lot of stuff underground, especially in the regions that have been settled by humans in the first millennia of agriculture.
My favorite in Czechia was a married pair that decided to build their family house on a plot not far from the Southern Moravian city of Znojmo (2007). They started digging the foundations ...
... and found out that their future home is going to be located in the outer zone of a huge necropolis from the 8th and 9th century. Several hundred silent neighbours at the least.
