Russian researchers announced on the Rostov Kremlin State Museum's VKontakte page that an intact 10th-century Merian axe had been unearthed near the village of Shulec in Yaroslavl, reported Lenta.ru. The iron blade, preserved after a millennium underground, measured 12 cm by 6.6 cm and weighed about 550 g, according to the same report.
Anatoly Kirpichnikov’s typology of medieval weapons placed the find in the category of ear-shaped, narrow-bladed axes, a design common among Finno-Ugric communities of the early Middle Ages. Such axes served both daily work and combat, noted Kommersant.
“For the Rostov land, this is a very rare find,” said museum employees, according to Gazeta.ru. They added that only three comparable axes had surfaced previously, all a century ago at the Sarskoye fortified settlement; none had been recovered elsewhere until now.
Archaeologists from the Rostov Kremlin Museum and the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences surveyed farmland around Shulec from July to September, aiming to map a rural settlement dated to the 10th–13th centuries and to document a nearby burial ground, reported Izvestia.
The team logged dozens of copper and iron objects—blades, domestic fittings, and fragments of farm tools. “An archaeological sensation,” wrote Kommersant, noting that complete iron tools from early medieval layers of north-eastern Rus were exceptionally scarce.
The Rostov region preserves clear traces of the Merians, a Finno-Ugric people who lived in the upper Volga basin. The newly discovered axe expands the small group of reference specimens for Merian metallurgy that previously rested on the three Sarskoye examples, explained Gazeta.ru.
After cataloguing, conservators will stabilize the blade in the Rostov Kremlin collections before public display, and metallographers plan to analyse forging methods, charcoal residues, and ore sources to link the tool to regional workshops. If associated pottery or organic samples confirm its context, the axe may anchor an absolute date for rural Merian occupation, offering a clearer timeline for life on the early medieval frontier.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.