Decorated goblet

There is no information about the circumstances of the discovery of the clay goblet of the Corded Ware culture. It is known from the archival records that on 7 September 1942 it was donated together with two analogous vessels to the collection of the Pomeranian State Museum (Pommersches Landesmuseum) in Szczecin by Mr Heinz Witt. It was only noted that the find came from Dołuje (German: Neuenkirchen). The lack of information about the discovery of these Neolithic vessels is not an isolated case. In the former Szczecin collections, the documentation of the context of the discovery of the archaeological museum acquisitions of the Pomeranian National Museum from 1940-1944 is often poor. It is certainly due to the loss of much of the collection documentation at the end of the Second World War, but also to the enormity of the work undertaken in the Prehistoric Department. Between 1940 and 1943, the then curator of the archaeological collections, Hans Jürgen Eggers, carried out the largest rescue excavations in the history of archaeological research in Pomerania. In 1941, he became a PhD habilitated and began lecturing at universities. The need to secure the collections and prepare the more valuable museum pieces for evacuation was also of great importance. These measures were launched in 1942 as part of the anti-aircraft regulations introduced after the first Allied carpet raids on German cities. Three Dołuje goblets were also exported. This find was first reported in the literature only in the 1960s. It was stressed that the similarity in appearance of the three cups decorated with circumferential bands of diagonal incisions and their good state of preservation suggest their origin as grave equipment. Such decorated forms may be associated with the middle phase of the functioning of the Corded Ware community in West Pomerania and refer to the period around the 3rd quarter of the 3rd millennium BC.

Krzysztof Kowalski