Stone hoe

The stone tool, the so-called hoe with a viper head, was discovered around the beginning of 1930s in the area of a small, no longer existing settlement Zolnica (German: Sollnitz) located on the edge of Wierzchucińska Forest, on the eastern edge of then Pomeranian Province, in the present district of Wejherowo. The find was handed over to the collection of the Provincial Museum of Pomeranian Antiquities (Provinzialmuseum Pommerscher Altertümer) in Szczecin by Reinhold Bewersdorf, the owner of a farm in Zolnica, through Eduard Stilow, the director of the District Welfare Office in Lębork and the manager of the local museum and the custodian of archaeological monuments. The hoe, together with some of the most significant new finds, was almost immediately published by Otto Kunkel, Director of the Szczecin institution, in a volume of the journal "Mannus" dedicated to the memory of Professor Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931). In 1942, it was evacuated from the Museum's headquarters. It only returned to the Szczecin collections in 2009. The slender, elaborately worked stone hoe with a convex upper side and a back part resembling a viper's head with an opening, is described as an East Prussian type. The area of their occurrence is limited to the south-eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, from the Lower Vistula to Lithuania. They also occur in the north-western part of Russia and Belarus. In the west, single specimens occur east of the Vistula River, in the Kashubian Lake District. Almost all hoes with adder-heads known so far were found without any context, which would enable their closer dating. They are usually referred to the period around the turn of the 3rd and the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC and associated with communities of the early Bronze Age, but with traditions still in the Stone Age. There are hypotheses that the form refers to shoemaker's hoof-shaped hoes.

Krzysztof Kowalski