Średniowieczny miecz z miejscowości nieznanej z województwa podkarpackiego : prace konserwatorskie i badania metalograficzno-technologiczne

In 2015 a sword discovered in the vicinity of Rzeszów coming from a private collection was acquired for conservation and technological examination. The blade of the sword is long, straight, medium broad, with gradual profile taper, and profiled with broad fuller on one side of the blade while the other side is flat. The point is short and convex. Crescent-shaped iron pommel of the hilt preserved. It has apparent thickening at its base and is boat-shaped in plan view. Additionally, a short bar guard survived that is also boat-shaped in plan view. The tang of the sword is short, broken, and it goes through the entire height of the pommel. The artefact was subject to the essential conservation work. The metallographic examination showed that the sword was forged from a single piece of hard ferrite-pearlite bloomer steel having the carbon content in the range of 0.5-0.7% and the hardness of 202-240 HV10. From the morphological point of view the blade of the examined sword can be attributed to type X according to Jan Petersen (1919, figures 1-2) and Ewart Oakshott (1964, 28-30), or to type two according to Alfred Geibig (1991, 84-85). At the same time, the hilt of this sword can be identified as Kombinationstyp 1 according to Alfred Geibig (1991, 25-31), which places it between variant I and V. In turn, basing on the classification by J.Petersen the pommel might be identified as type B, N, or X, while the guard as type B, C, E , F, or H (Petersen 1919). The morphology and the technology of production, as well as the analysis of slag containing significant amount of manganese, may indicate foreign provenance of this sword. Its chronology might be correlated with the 9th to 10th century.