Multi-stemmed core

The presented core and two flakes were discovered in unknown circumstances and location near Nowe Warpno, a village in the West Pomeranian Voivodeship. The old inventory number suggests the items were part of the pre-war collection of the Pommersches Landesmuseum in Stettin, a museum that operated in Szczecin from 1927 to 1945. The artefact takes the form of an elongated wedge made from a high-quality light grey Cretaceous flint nodule. Technically, it is a multi-platform core, meaning that several areas on its surface were used as striking platforms for flake removal using a soft hammer. This type of reduction strategy is typical for cores in the final stages of exploitation, especially at sites lacking access to good-quality raw material. The core from Nowe Warpno can be linked to the Late Palaeolithic, most likely to the Ahrensburg or Swiderian culture. Communities of these cultures inhabited the tundra, park tundra and sparse birch forests that covered Western Pomerania during the last cold episode of the last glaciation, known as the Younger Dryas (circa 10,800–9,600 BC). Their subsistence economy was based primarily on hunting reindeer during seasonal spring and autumn migrations, mainly along narrow valleys, as well as hunting other game that grazed during the summer in wide river valleys. These activities were complemented by fishing and gathering. The Ahrensburg and Swiderian cultures belong to the leaf-point complex, whose most characteristic feature is the use of specific types of projectile points for arrows, spears and javelins. These are known as leaf points or stemmed points. Michał Adamczyk