Single-jagged edge

The Federmesser-type backed blade from Wołczków, the Police district, comes from the collection of 44 objects discovered before 1910 by an amateur archaeologist H. Schumann from Löcknitz, in a place called Streitkamp. After Schumann's death the entire collection was donated to the Gesellschaft für Pommersche Geschichte und Altertumskunde in Szczecin. The exact location of the hoard remains unknown, as Schumann's original catalogue was lost, and a copy was never made. The backed blade was made on a chip deflected with a soft antler pestle from a lump of local chalk flint of very high quality. For a long time, the collection of flint wares from Wołczków was regarded as evidence of the oldest settlement of Palaeolithic people in Pomerania. According to older views, it required favourable and stable environmental conditions formed after the glacier receded. It was assumed that human groups lived only in an already familiar environment; in the case of the Federmesser culture to which the Schumann collection was included, it was birch-pine forests. That meant that between the receding of the glacier and permanent settlement, a very long time passed, even approx. 4-5 thousand years. Meanwhile, the latest research results on pioneer settlement in Scandinavia indicate that in areas freed from ice masses, the first plants appear almost immediately, attracting herbivorous birds and mammals and soon afterwards predators and human groups. The Rhine basin well illustrates it in eastern Norway, where colonisation already took place approx. 100 years after the glacier receded.

Michał Adamczyk