Decorated goblet

The earthenware vessel - a low goblet decorated on the neck with a circumferential band of ornamentation consisting of bipartite cord impressions and punctures comes from the equipment of a grave from the younger Stone Age discovered in 1897 in Zdroje (German: Finkenwalde). The town was located on the border of the Bukowe Hills and the Oder valley, which was incorporated into Szczecin in 1939. The municipality donated the artefacts to the Society for the History and Antiquity of Pomerania museum collection in Szczecin. Following the donation, Adolf Stubenrauch, the keeper of the Society's collection, went to the discovery site. According to his findings, the grave was discovered during building works on Mount Skórcza (German: Finkenwalder Höhe), on the edge of the Bukowa Forest. As a result of local tourism development at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, restaurants extensively developed there, and viewing terraces were created. While constructing the foundations, about one metre from the ground surface, the construction of fieldstones was uncovered, forming oval paving. Underneath it, apart from a goblet, a two-sheeted undecorated vessel was found, a fragmentarily preserved third goblet vessel decorated with cord impressions, a five-sided stone axe with a hole for setting a handle, two small flint axes with thick blades and a lump of amber. There are sometimes doubts in the literature about whether all these objects came from one assemblage or two adjacent graves were discovered there. There are doubts concerning the interpretation of the sketch of the destroyed stone construction and the co-occurrence of vessels decorated with cord impressions with an undecorated two-mouth form, characteristic of the youngest communities originating from the Funnel Beaker culture. These controversies cannot be resolved unequivocally, but the set of vessels and the presence of an axe, which in terms of shape belongs to the younger forms in the rope pottery culture, allows dating the finds from Zdroje to the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BC.

Krzysztof Kowalski