A man who discovered metal detecting as a hobby 30 years ago has made the find of a lifetime with the discovery of a 3,000-year-old spearhead.

Dick Banaszak, 65, discovered a spearhead with a socketed shaft while exploring the Root River in Racine, Wisconsin. He immediately knew it was something valuable because he had already found an incomplete arrowhead from the Copper Culture a year earlier.

“I sat under a tree,” said Banaszak, a retired civil servant. Newsweek about the moment he made the discovery. “I just sat there, scraping the earth and thought, ‘Wow, this is thousands of years old, it was incredible and now I have it in my hand.'”

He added after finding it: “I was done for the day. I was too excited, I had to go home.”

Banaszak first shared his find on the Reddit subreddit r/metaldetecting, where one informed user suggested it was a copper culture spearhead, but another joked it was a fence spike.

He later learned that in an episode of the television series Metal detectoriststhe characters found something similar and thought it was a spearhead, but it ultimately turned out to be from a fence post, and that’s what the user was referring to.

But Banaszak was determined to prove the informed user right and took the spearhead to the archaeology department of the local university, where he was told he had “something special.”

It was confirmed that it is probably a spearhead with a socket shaft from the Copper Culture, about 3,000 years old.

The “Ancient Copper Culture” refers to the tools made by people in the Great Lakes region of North America, which probably began making them around 4000 BC, according to the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM), which houses one of the world’s largest collections of Copper Culture artifacts.

Tens of thousands of Ancient Copper Culture artifacts are thought to have been discovered over the years, but the MPM believes the number could have been much higher if early European settlers in North America had not melted down the artifacts to forge new items.

Since ancient Copper Culture artifacts are only found in the Great Lakes region and Banaszak lives in the southernmost part, “a find like this is even rarer” than in the northern part, he said.

And Banaszak’s discovery gained popularity on Reddit. On July 24, he shared confirmation of his identity with r/metaldetecting via his r/deekfleet account, where it received over 2,400 upvotes.

One impressed commentator called it “absolutely incredible,” while another enthusiast called it “archaeologically interesting and perhaps significant,” pointing out that “3,000 years ago, the use of copper was becoming increasingly restricted. This spearhead may be the last of its kind rather than the first.”

And one user revealed: “I want to be the first to apologize to the OP (original poster) for calling it a picket fence post. Congrats on an amazing find!”

One person cheered about the “incredible piece of history you have found” and asked what Banaszak planned to do with it.

And he told Newsweek that he would keep it, planned to put it in a special display case and that one day it would go to his son, with whom he always went metal detecting as a child.

When asked why he shared his find on Reddit, Banaszak said he simply wanted to “promote the hobby.”

“It’s something that really excites me. That’s why I’m participating in this metal detecting group to share my knowledge with others and maybe get someone interested in metal detecting.

“I told some of my friends about copper culture and they read up on it and were quite fascinated by it,” he said.

“I want other people to go out and do what I love to do.”

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