Decorated goblet

An earthenware goblet with a rope ornament on the neck, together with fragments of an amber ornament, fragments of other vessels, a flint dagger and a stone axe, was found in a grave which was discovered by accident in the mid 1860s during the crushing of fieldstones at a forester's lodge south-west of Podjuchy. Its furnishings were donated to the Szczecin collections by the co-founder of the grog factory in Podjuchy, the industrialist Ferdinand Didier. The appearance of the grave has been only laconically described, but there is no information about burials. The pit, or burial chamber, was covered and probably also surrounded by stones. Albert Voss, a Pomeranian, curator of prehistoric collections in Berlin at that time and the first researcher of Pomeranian megaliths, even suggested that the construction discovered in Podjuchy, called "Steinkaveln", belonged to the tombs of giants. The arrangement of the gifts in the tomb also remains unknown. Although in the copy of the original inventory and the publication of the artefacts that came to the Szczecin collections in 1864-1865, there is information about the transfer of the urn containing the remaining objects, this refers to the condition in which the discovered furnishings found their way to the museum rather than to their original arrangement. The preserved set of gifts is rich and varied. They consisted of vessels - at least four decorated clay cups, a stone tool - a four-sided axe made of diorite, a prestigious weapon - a lance-shaped flint dagger and a body, and costume ornament - an amber pendant in the form of a perforated disc. The set presents most of the assortment of objects discovered in Pomerania in the graves of the rope pottery culture from the 2nd half of the 3rd millennium BC, which can also include axes and flint arrowheads.

Krzysztof Kowalski