Bracelet, bronze, Lubowidz, Lębork poviat

Bracelets made of bronze or silver, with characteristic endings in the shape of viper heads, are referred to as “snake-head bracelets”. These jewellery items are typical for the clothing of the people of the Wielbark culture from the earlier Roman period in the 1st century. This culture owes its name to the findings in the town of Wielbark, near Malbork. In the period between the 1st and 4th centuries, the Wielbark people inhabited most of Pomerania. This snake-head bracelet was a part of the furnishings of one of the inhumation graves discovered in a large cemetery in Lubowidz. By the skeleton of the buried woman, the excavators found two snake-head bracelets, three different bronze fibulae used to fasten clothes, a neck-ring made of 65 amber and glass beads fastened with a bronze S-shaped buckle, and two clay spindle whorls. The cemetery in Lubowidz was discovered in 1898. The first excavations in 1938-1939 were led by Helmut Agde on behalf of the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Szczecin. They were connected with the progressive destruction of the cemetery located in the gravel pit. Earlier, accidental finds of individual objects were systematically catalogued by Eduard Stielow, director of the Social Welfare Office in Lębork, who in the 1930s was also the local guardian of historical monuments. The materials discovered in the cemetery in Lubowidz in the years 1898, 1926 1932, 1934 and 1938 were transferred to the Museum in Szczecin and to the Westpreussisches Provinzial-Museum in Gdańsk. Some of them were described in a local periodical Heimatkalender für den Kreis Lauenburg in Pommern. In 1938, the first collective study of finds from the cemetery in Lubowidz was published as a term paper of H.J. Freyrat written under the supervision of Helmut Agde. A full monograph on the cemetery by Ryszard Wołągiewicz, an archaeologist from the National Museum in Szczecin, was published in 1995.

Bartłomiej Rogalski