Necklace made of peccary and jaguar teeth

The bronze neck-ring has distinctively thick, cup-shaped ends, with hollows at the ends. The arms of the neck-ring are richly decorated on the outside in various ways. The hourglass-shaped impressions at both ends were probably originally filled with red enamel. The neck-ring was found by accident in a field in 1933, during agricultural work. Around it, regular patches of burning were noticed on the surface of the field. As it later turned out, these were the cremation burials of the Jastorf culture (named after the village of Jastorf in Lower Saxony). The excavations were made by Emil Schalow, a local volunteer guardian of historical monuments. Before World War II, such guardians mostly worked within the boundaries of the poviat of that time. They were recruited from a group of people with appropriate education. Most often, they were the teachers, officials, military officers, and clergymen, who gathered information about local discoveries and often had their own collections of monuments and conducted field research. The presented neck-ring is an excellent example of the effectiveness of the work of the guardians of historical monuments. From the beginning, the finding aroused great interest among archaeologists because it represents a style associated with the Celtic influence in northern Europe in the last centuries BC. Shortly after the discovery of the neck-ring, in 1936, Hans Jürgen Eggers from the Szczecin Museum began methodical excavation of the cemetery in Długie, only to be interrupted in 1939. He excavated about 30 acres of the site, discovering a total of 129 objects. The cemetery in Długie is one of the most important necropolises of the Jastorf culture in Western Pomerania. The necklace can be dated to the earlier pre-Roman period (3rd-2nd centuries BC).

Bartłomiej Rogalski