Decorated goblet

The clay cup with a lump, decorated with strings, comes from a grave of the Corded Ware culture discovered in 1934 by a stonemason looking for raw material in a forest belonging to the property in Dębogórze. Archaeological research was undertaken there by Hans Jürgen Eggers, the then curator of archaeological collections in the Szczecin Museum. The oblong, two-metre-deep grave cavity was fortified and covered with stones. Inside there were skeletons of four adult men arranged in a contorted position. Three were resting, one on top of the other on the south side and the fourth on the north side, indicating that the bodies were not laid simultaneously. Four earthenware vessels, including a goblet with a lump and a cup with an ear decorated with a rope imprint ornament, a bowl with a handle and a pot with an ear without decoration, were found with them. The undecorated vessels can be considered younger, although related to the same archaeological culture. The widespread custom in the funerary rites of the Corded Ware community in West Pomerania was burying the dead in individual graves. Only a few graves in which two to four skeletons were found are known from that region. The dead were buried in them simultaneously or "added" subsequent burials, as in Dębogóra. Individuals buried together were of the same or different sex and similar or different ages. The multi-burial graves discovered to date are connected to younger phases of the existence of the Corded Ware community in Pomerania at the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age. The radiocarbon dates obtained from two older skeletons from Dębogóra indicate that the men died between the end of the 3rd and the middle of the 4th quarter of the 3rd millennium BC.

Krzysztof Kowalski