Decorated amphora

A reconstructed clay vessel - a sizeable two-lobed amphora with a cylindrical neck, decorated with an arrangement of stamps and cord impressions, comes from a grave discovered in Kartlewo (German: Kartlow). It came into the collection of the Pomeranian State Museum (Pommersches Landesmuseum) in Szczecin in May 1936. Little is known about the circumstances of the discovery of this vessel. The discovery of four spherical amphorae and a flint axe with a carved blade (chisel) from a tomb in Kartlewo was reported by an educational worker from Świdwin, Dr Heinrich Wandelt. In 1933, he was appointed a supervisor of archaeological monuments in the Świdwin part of the then Bialogard district in the territory of the Kreis Schivelbein, abolished in 1932 and incorporated into the Kreis Belgard. He replaced the outgoing headmaster of the school in Świdwin, the renowned regionalist Ludwig Kortlepel. H. Wandelt's original report has not survived, and the note, which is in the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin, only mentions a tomb called "bed of giants" (German: Hünenbett), with a chamber built of rock slabs. Terms such as "bed of giants" or "tomb of giants", adopted from popular culture, were applied to some prehistoric large-stone constructions. The author of the note indicated that it might have referred to the so-called Kujawy type of tomb, i.e. a monumental structure built in the shape of a strongly elongated triangle and provided with an erratic shield. Such megalithic tombs were constructed in the 4th millennium BC by Neolithic communities of the Funnel Beaker culture. The idea of using existing megaliths or constructing a more diminutive, degenerate stone form - box graves buried in the ground, was cultivated by the communities of Globular Amphora from the end of the 4th and up to the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. The amphora from Kartlewo is a vessel characteristic of this archaeological culture.

Krzysztof Kowalski