Decorated mortarboard goblet

A clay pot discovered near Żdżary (German: Eichberg) found its way to the archaeological collection of the Provincial Museum of Pomeranian Antiquities (Provinzialmuseum Pommerscher Altertümer) in Szczecin at the turn of January and February 1932. They were donated by Hugo Rehbein, a teacher from a local school, who between 1913 and 1945 systematically recorded and collected archaeological finds and sometimes undertook small rescue excavations near the Ina Valley, rich in marshland and sand dunes, west and north-west of Goleniów. Some of his discoveries went to the Szczecin collections, while others, with the permission of the Pomeranian conservator of archaeological monuments, remained in the school building, which was bombed in 1945. What remained of them was the drawing documentation which H. Rehbein drew up in 1942. Together with copies of reports sent to the conservation service it formed the basis of a study prepared in the 1960s, which appeared in a publication devoted to archaeological research carried out in the 1930s and 1940s in Pomerania. Among the artefacts donated to Szczecin were finds from 1931-1932 from a dune called "Kleiner Heideberg" located between Żdżary and the Ina River. Albert Thoms, a farmer from Modrzewo, came across a clay goblet while shovelling sand here, another one was discovered by a pupil of H. Rechbein while playing in the sand. Then the teacher also started his search and discovered another goblet as well as fragments of pottery and stone tools. The presented vessel belongs to unique findings of the rope pottery community in Western Pomerania. Similar mortar goblets are often found in the culture of individual graves in the area of Jutland. However, some elements of its decoration style refer to the ornamentation of vessels of the bell cup culture, which allows relating it to the younger phases of the local grouping of the Corded Ware culture.

Krzysztof Kowalski