Stone axe

An important group of objects that find their way into museum archaeological collections are items discovered in forest areas. It is no different with the Pomeranian finds collected in Szczecin over the last two hundred years. Sometimes these are objects made centuries ago that forest workers came across accidentally during their work in the forest, at other times they are collected as the result of a deliberate search for archaeological sources, such as the discoveries in the Goleniów area made by forester Matern in the 1930s. A stone axe from Myślibórz Wielki was found in the adjacent forest complex (German: Gross Mützelburg Forst). It came to the collection of antiquities in Szczecin around 1868-1874, as a gift from the forester Küster, delivered through a retired forest officer Schulz. It was found together with three other rock artefacts - another axe, a flint dagger and a stone axe - discovered under the roots of a tall pine tree. Archival records and the oldest references in literature describe these items as a treasure-type deposit. The collection of the National Museum in Szczecin currently holds three items from that find: an axe and hatchet, which remained in the museum building during the Second World War, and a second hatchet, which was evacuated and returned in 2009. The fate of the flint dagger is unknown. The presented axe belongs to forms with an oval cross-section and a pointed hilt, which, like the axe, can be associated with the Middle Neolithic. The presence in the assemblage of a flint dagger, a form occurring mainly in younger groupings, in the final centuries of the Younger Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age, is considered somewhat controversial. However, it cannot be ruled out that we are dealing with an assemblage combining traditional products of the Funnel Beaker culture with the oldest flint daggers, which were deposited around the middle of the 3rd millennium BC.

Krzysztof Kowalski