Flint adze

The flint adze found its way to the collection of the West Pomerania Museum in Szczecin in 1969, together with five other flint tools discovered by accident during land improvement works in Warnołęka. We owe the information about the find to a postman from Nowe Warpno, who handed over the artefacts via Szczecin's Monuments Conservation Workshop. The tools seem to have been made by a single artist. They are not finished products, but prepared for surface polishing at the end of production. They have traces of negatives of reflections forming the shape and levelling the edges. They were made of flint of chalky age with greyish-white colour, which changed due to covering them with rust patina formed in the humid environment of their centuries-long deposition. The narrow-bladed quadrangular forms have slightly varying lengths (13.6-17.4 cm) and some variation in the shape of the blade. Some of them have a straight blade in frontal view, while others, like the presented specimen, are curved. The dissimilarity can hardly be considered a coincidence, considering the skill of the maker manifested in the careful shaping of all surfaces. It is possible that these formally similar half-pieces were prepared as functionally different tools: with a straight edge as adzes for chopping and chiselling, and with an arched edge - as chisels for gouging and hollowing. The tradition of collecting multi-walled flint tools by Neolithic farming communities in the European Lowlands in the 4th and 3rd millennium BC, following changes in flint processing technology, which manifested, among other things, in the production of honed axes, is a long-known phenomenon. Cluster finds of this type of tools are considered in terms of the distribution of flint products from centres of raw material extraction, its partial processing into semi-finished or finished products, as well as in terms of manifestation of beliefs.

Krzysztof Kowalski