17th century flintlock

[Raf]

Unfortunately the Russian location of the find make it difficult to draw any conclusions . Below is an almost identical lock recently liberated from active service in Tibet. You can ignore the eccentric trigger release mechanism as this appears to be a local fix for defective sears on locks which are evidently much older. How much older is simply a guess. Stylistically you could argue that they are rustic variations on known seventeenth century Russian lock type or you could argue that these locks originated in the Mediterranean and were distributed through Portuguese trading . Their similarity to mediteranean toe locks ; Algerian , Iberian or Italian is difficult to ignore.