Stone axe

The stone axe was discovered by accident in June 1968 in a gravel pit located on the culmination of a plateau adjacent to wet meadows northeast of Kolin. An inhabitant of nearby Bralin spotted it during aggregate extraction. Apart from the axe, he found an entire clay vessel and a fragment of another, damaged one, and two damaged flint axes in a landslide. Following the notification, archaeologists from the then Szczecin Western Pomerania Museum (now the National Museum in Szczecin) carried out a one-day investigation in the gravel pit. During them, they established that the discovered objects were buried at a depth of about one metre below the ground surface. However, they did not find the remains of an expected grave, from which they could have come, nor traces of burial. A clay goblet, a stone axe and small fragments of a destroyed vessel, probably also a goblet, found their way to the museum collection. According to the discoverer's information, both flint axes were taken to the then functioning school in the neighbouring Krępcewo. No information on the appearance and fate of these artefacts has survived, and the school in Krępcewo no longer exists. The axe with a simple body, an opening placed in the rounded part of the handle, refers to the so-called Wkrzański examples, occurring in the Lower Odra zone in the youngest phases of colonisation of the Corded Ware culture communities. Analogous chronology has a squat clay goblet with a button on the neck decorated with an ornament in the form of a circumferential stripe and incised in the herringbone pattern. The similar relative chronology of both monuments supports the assumption that they come from the equipment of a single grave, which can be dated to the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BC and can be associated with the transition period between the end of the Younger Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age.

Krzysztof Kowalski