Featured Object: Spear Point

• Post Date: 8/31/2026
• Author: Beth Watkins, manager of exhibit interpretation and visitor experience
• Reading Time: 2 minute read

• Collections tag

This spear point is a fine example of bronze weaponry made in Lorestan in western Iran during the early part of the first millennium BCE. The ancient bronze artisans of this area are well known for the wide variety and high quality of the objects they made, including statuettes, plaques, scepters, horse bits and trappings, decorated axes, shields, etc. The thin tab at the back was designed to be placed into the wooden shaft of the spear.

The vast majority of these bronzes were looted from tombs and other archaeological sites between 1928 and 1950, an era when little official excavation was possible in this mountainous and relatively remote region.

University alum Pauline Birky-Kreutzer (1936) donated this spear point to the museum in 1996 along with 11 other bronze pieces from western Iran. She and her husband Carl worked for the Near East Foundation in Tehran between 1956 and 1958. Birky-Kreutzer was instrumental in the founding of the Peace Corps in 1961 and went on to run the program in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Text adapted from our temporary exhibit Collecting and Connecting: One Hundred Years at the Spurlock Museum.