Knives as an artefact category have rarely been the subject of dedicated studies. There have been attempts at their categorisation and typology, but the large scale of their occurrence and relative similarity of forms discovered did not allow a comprehensive approach for the individual archaeological cultures. The same difficulty applies to the Przeworsk Culture, which yielded an enormous number of iron objects, and not just in comparison with other cultures of European Barbaricum. Before the main discussion of the issue at hand, it is worth it to clarify the terminology, as the individual knife parts have been referred to by different terms in various publications, which is surely the cause of some confusion (Fig. 1, 2).

One of the knife categories in the Przeworsk Culture consists of specimens with handles reinforced with ferrules made from an iron strip, dated to the Late Pre-Roman Period and the early phase of the Roman Period. They can be distinguished from knives with pseudo-ferrules, that is fittings without an inner opening but tightly attached to the tang, which were a kind of a bolster for the handle (Fig. 4). This knife category still needs to be catalogued and discussed separately.

Ferrules reinforcing the front of the knife handle are oval or almond-shaped; other shapes are rare. They are made from a thin, narrow, iron strip. Handle rivets further from the blade are wider than the ferrules, which indicates deliberate moulding of the handle shape. Przeworsk Culture knives of such a design have blades of varying lengths, from very long (over 20 cm) to short (10 cm and fewer). They are found in both male and female graves, although they are more common in the former (Fig. 14). They are dated from phase A2 (Fig. 5) through the transition between phase A2 and A3 (Fig. 3) and phase A3 (Figs. 7, 8) to the end of phase A3/beginning of phase B1 (Fig. 9, 10) and early phase B1 (Fig. 11), being the most common in phase A3–A3/B1, that is in the second half of the 1st century BCE and the beginning of the 1st century CE. The length of the blade has neither chronological nor territorial significance (Table 1, Fig. 17). Two distinct concentrations of the artefacts in question can be distinguished. The western one covers the area of southern Greater Poland and Lower Silesia, the eastern one is located in Mazovia (Fig. 14). Due to their relatively substantial number (37 specimens have been catalogued), they should be considered forms characteristic of the early phases of the Przeworsk Culture, where they probably also originated. The largest number (seven specimens) is known from the Oblin cemetery, Garwolin County, where they are dated to all the chronological phases of their occurrence, i.e., from phase A2 to phase B1. For this reason, I propose to designate the knife form under discussion as type Oblin. The great precision of workmanship (this applies to the specimens from the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw I examined personally), the presence of openings and rivets in the handle tangs indicate that highly specialised workshops capable of creating fairly complicated designs operated in the 1st century BCE and the very beginning of the 1st century CE. Those specialised knife-making workshops vanished around the turn of the era. This coincides with the disappearance of workshops manufacturing wheel-thrown pottery near Cracow, which, according to Tomasz Bochnak, was due to the fall of the so-called Celtic circle – the collapse of markets and travel routes. As a result, the conditions for the functioning of highly specialised workshops would also cease to exist. Perhaps the abandonment of manufacture of fairly complicated – and likely relatively more expensive – knives is another manifestation of the then economic destabilisation within the entire area of the Przeworsk Culture.