Decorated goblet-like vessel

The clay vessel with a cup-shaped form was reconstructed from preserved fragments discovered during excavations in Dąbrówno (Schöneichen), in a cemetery with barrow and box graves, carried out in Pomerania in 1935 as part of a programme of inventorying megalithic tombs from the Neolithic period. A proposal for an inventory of Pomeranian megaliths, according to the model used in 1926-1928 in the Hanoverian Province, was presented in 1930 by Prof. Dr Ernst Sprockhoff (1892-1967), Director of the Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum Mainz, to the then provincial conservator of archaeological monuments and Director of the Pomeranian State Museum (Pommersches Landesmuseum) in Szczecin at the same time. Together with excavations on several tombs, the project was carried out until 1936 with funds from the conservation fund. The main survey to the east of the Oder was carried out in 1934, and excavations at selected sites in 1935. E. Sprockhoff published the results in the 1960s in a volume of an atlas of megalithic tombs, which comprehensively presents these constructions from the area of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, several dozen barrows and large box graves were recorded in Dąbrówno. In 1934, the cemetery was almost destroyed due to land cultivation. The inventory included the remains of two better-preserved graves made of stone slabs and stones. During the excavations carried out in 1935 in one of the box graves, Neolithic objects related to the Globular Amphora culture were discovered: fragments of the presented vessel with a funnel neck and a bulbous base, decorated with fluted slats and an oval amber pendant resembling a pendant in the form of a labrys - an axe with two blades.

Krzysztof Kowalski