Flint chisel

The chisel, together with two other flint products - a lance-shaped dagger and a crescent-shaped sickle - were found in unknown circumstances near Parsów (German Wartenberg). These artefacts were bought into the Szczecin collection of Gesellschaft für pommersche Geschichte und Altertumskunde by a certain Krüger, a postman from Stary Czarnów. References made in the copies of the original inventory and the publication of the museum acquisitions for 1904 prepared by Hugon Schumann, a doctor from Löcknitz, collector and expert on Pomeranian antiquities, indicate that the objects were discovered in a grave formed like a chest made of stone slabs. Flint chisels, daggers and sickles appear with different frequency in burial furnishings of communities living in Pomerania from the developed phases of the younger Stone Age to the beginning of the Bronze Age. However, their co-occurrence in one group is unique among the grave goods discovered so far. Such objects and their standard features allow dating the tomb's creation to the end of the 3rd or beginning of the 4th quarter of the 3rd millennium BC and associating it with people of the Corded Ware culture. The oldest form in the Parsów complex is a chisel. Similar tools are found in the inventories of the Amphora Cultures, which are even several hundred years older. A crescent-shaped flint sickle accompanied chisels in one of the destroyed megalithic tombs associated with the Funnel Beaker or Globular Amphora cultures. However, such sickles are primarily related to communities from the Late Neolithic or even younger, dating from the early Bronze Age. Similarly, graves containing flint daggers like the one discovered at Parsów are dated from the 2nd half of the 3rd to the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC.

Krzysztof Kowalski