Island grave reveals 1,000-year-old treasure trove of ‘elite’ jewellery including a solid amber ring

Archaeologists have uncovered an ‘elite’ grave from the 12th century during excavation work in Northern Poland. The discovery in the village of Ostrowite included two amber rings, a bronze bowl, and an iron knife in a leather sheath with bronze fittings.

Distinguished from previous graves discovered at the site by its size and rich equipment, scientists say they believe the items belonged to elite members of the then local Christian community. 

Team leader Dr. Jerzy Sikora from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Lodz said: “The deceased was most likely a representative of local, Pomeranian elites.

“It is striking that there are two identical rings, symmetrically arranged relative to the axis of the body. Amber ones, no less. The situation is quite unique. I do not know a similar burial.”

He added that the size of the grave, a wooden structure the size of a small house, and the rings were probably associated with symbols of power. 

Sikora said: “Amber can be related to either mediation in trade in this raw material or control over local deposits. During the modern age, amber was extracted in the area of Chojnice.”

In addition, archaeologists found a bronze bowl by the skeleton’s feet, inside of which were fragments of wood thought to have belonged to the man’s coffin.

The deceased was also had an iron knife in a leather sheath with bronze fittings and two coin pieces. On the surface of the bowl and the knife sheath, the archaeologists noticed fragments and imprints of fabrics. 

Under the bowl, there were small fragments of leather, probably remnants of the deceased’s footwear, preserved thanks to the preservative effect of copper oxides.

In previous years, archaeologists made several similar discoveries in the area, with Dr. Sikora saying that such graves were associated with emerging local elites. Similar graves are known, for example, from Usadel and Usedom in Mecklenburg (Germany) or Cedynia in Poland.

He added that two states were established in Pomerania in the 12th century: of the West Pomeranian Gryfites, subjected by Bolesław III Wrymouth and Christianised by Otto of Bamberg, and East Pomeranian Samborides, dependent on Polish princes, probably also from the time of Bolesław III Wrymouth.

Ostrowite, where the latest discovery was made, was an important local centre of power, which functioned from the 11th to the 14th century.

Dr. Sikora said: “It was a fairly extensive complex with a settlement on a nearby island, which at least from about 1160 was connected to the shore with a wooden bridge, but most likely functioned earlier.”

On the eastern shore of the lake, there were two cemeteries. Trade was an important aspect of the functioning of the settlement, as evidenced by the earlier findings of archaeologists, including about 20 weights for balance scales, coins (including Western European, mainly Saxon ones, as well as numerous imitations) and a number of imported items, such as bronze bowls.

The discovered items indicate trade with the areas of Pomerania, Greater Poland, as well as Scandinavia, Western Europe and Ruthenia.

Skeletal remains of children amid 119 burials stun archaeologists

The chilling archaeological discovery unearthed the skeletal remains of adults and children, some of whom were buried in pairs and coins in their mouths. The remains were buried in the village of Jeżowe in the Subcarpathia region of southeast Poland, where the S19 motorway is being constructed. Archaeologists have dated the discovery to the 17th century.

According to the General Director for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKIA), 115 burials were first unearthed in Jeżowe in the Góry Kościelne or Church Mountain range.

Archaeologists have since expanded their discoveries to a total of 119 remains.

The experts have since confirmed up to 80 per cent of the bones belong to children.

According to archaeologist Kataryna Oleszek of the archaeology group Arkadia, the burial site could have been designated specifically for children.

A second theory suggests there was a high mortality rate among children in this area.

The archaeologists hope to learn more after a careful analysis by anthropologists.

She told TVN24: “We must take all precautions, we must work with as much delicacy and attention to detail as possible.

“First of all, so we do not miss anything, and second of all, these bones are very fragile.”

The archaeologists are, however, certain the buried people were most likely poor as they were buried without any personal possessions.

The GDDKIA said in a statement: “115 skeletal graves were discovered during archaeological works on the construction of the S19 Podgórze-Kamień section.

“While carrying out archaeological surveillance work as part of the S19 motorway, graves with human remains were discovered.

“The burial pits were located in the Kościelne Mountains, a range of hills in Jeżówe, wherein 1604 the first parish was erected.

“To date, archaeologists have found 115 skeletal graves.”

The grave pits were all oriented along the east to west axis, with heads pointing towards the west.

The GDDKIA said: “Based on archaeological observations to date, we can conclude that about 70 to 80 percent of all burials are children.

“This is probably tied to the fact that in this place a part of the cemetery was separated, where the youngest residents of Jeżowe were buried.”

The burial pits were poorly equipped and the archaeologists were surprised to find coins in the mouths of the remains.

The coins are most likely a link to old Polish folklore and beliefs about the afterlife.

These coins are known as an obol of the dead or Charon’s obol – a form of payment used by the soul in the afterlife. In ancient Greek mythology, the souls of the dead would hand over the coin to Charon, the ferryman of Hades.

The ferryman would then carry the deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron into the world of the dead. These particular coins are known as boratynki and półtoraki.

The coins were minted at the start of the 17th century during the reign of King Sigismund III Vasa. According to Eric J. Gilchrest”s book Revelation 21-22 in Light of Jewish and Greco-Roman Utopianism, the practice of burying people with obols in the fifth century BCE.

He wrote: “As early as the sixth and into the fifth centuries BCE, the landscape of the afterlife began to change dramatically.

“Archaeological evidence shows that it is during the fifth century that the dead begin to be buried with an obol meant for Charon, the ferryman at the river Styx.”

Many more incredible archaeological discoveries have been made in Poland. In 2019, for instance, researchers found evidence of two 7,000-year-old structures.

Skeleton with bird skull in its mouth identified as 12-year-old Scandinavian girl from 17th century

When long-dead human remains are found buried in unusual circumstances, anthropologists are usually able to piece together why. But the bones of a child that lived just a couple of hundred years ago in Poland are proving to be a bit of a head-scratcher.

In a shallow grave in Tunel Wielki Cave, located in Sąspowska Valley in the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, the body of a young child was found buried all alone. The only other human bones in the cave were over 4,500 years old, so it wasn’t a location in regular use for burials.

It’s the only modern human found buried in a cave in the region, archaeologists believe.

But it gets even weirder: the skull of a small bird, a chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), was found in the child’s mouth, and another chaffinch skull was found next to its cheek.

The skeleton is not fresh, exactly. The remains were first discovered 50 years ago during excavations of the caves, but almost all the finds had been placed in storage pretty much immediately without ever having been examined or described.

Archaeologist Małgorzata Kot from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw had embarked on a project to analyse these artefacts when she stumbled upon the remains.

“When we opened another dusty box from an old research project, we found small child’s bones,” she told Science in Poland, a science outreach website run by the Polish government’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

“Their discoverer, professor Waldemar Chmielewski, never published the details of this find, he only included a photograph of it in a book published in the 1980s.”

Radiocarbon dating suggests the child was buried in the later half of the 18th century CE, or very early in the 19th century, and died at about the age of 10. Preliminary examination of the bones also suggests that the child was suffering from malnutrition.

As for why it was buried in a cave all by itself, with the heads (or skulls) of chaffinches, that’s still an utter enigma.

“This practice is not known among the ethnologists we have asked for opinions. It remains a mystery why the child was buried in a cave in this way, not in a cemetery in a nearby village,” Kot said.

The bird skulls had already been described in an earlier paper, but the authors had not known that they had been found as part of a human burial, since this burial has never before been described in published research.

“We returned to [the bird] skulls, but the new analysis did not show anything that could at least explain why the chaffinch heads accompanied the child. For example, there are no traces of cuts on the skulls. We only know that these were the remains of adult birds,” Kot said.

This bizarre mystery raises many questions, and unfortunately, there’s a serious hindrance to the team’s quest to find more answers – the child’s skull is missing. It was sent to anthropologists in Wrocław straight after excavation, and no one knows what became of it.

Sadly, the dozens of caves in the Sąspowska Valley have been extremely damaged by humans since the child was interred.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, farmers removed much of the sediment from the caves to use as fertiliser, damaging countless artefacts dating back to at least the Palaeolithic, including human remains and Neanderthal tools.

Industrial exploitation of the caves has been banned for decades, but there’s no telling how much damage had already been done – or if there were any clues that may reveal why these much more recent remains had been buried there and in such a strange way.

The team intends to conduct a more thorough series of DNA tests on the remaining bones to see if it yields any more clues about the child’s tragic end. So it may not be the last we hear of this strange burial.

Spinning Tools Recovered from 2,000-Year-Old Grave in Poland

Archaeologists have uncovered a 2,000-year-old grave containing human remains lying one on top of the other, spindle whorls and the remains of distaffs during barrow excavations in the Sarbia forestry district.

The remains are thought to date back to the Wielbark culture and according to researchers the presence of the weaving materials suggest that the bodies had similar professions. 

Spindle whorls are weights attached to a spindle, they prevent the threads from sliding and maintain the speed of the spin. They have a hole in the middle. They are usually made of clay, less frequently of stone. In both graves, there were also silver, S-shaped clasps, and similar bowls.

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Head of the research project Professor Andrzej Michałowski from the Faculty of Archaeology at the Adam Mickiewicz University, attempted to reconstruct the funeral ritual and the reason for finding two burials under the barrow.

He said: “The body of the deceased was already in a wooden boat, which she used to take to cross to the other bank of the river… It seemed as if she was napping after work, dressed in her best robes. Her chest decorated with a rain of beads made of glass, amber and bone… Pendants sparkling in the necklace. The silver sparkle of the S-shaped clasp on her neck.”

During the excavation, the remains of a box placed at her feet were also discovered. 

Michałowski said: “It contained her beloved work tools. A set of professional whorls and two distaffs, so that in the afterlife she would be able to weave the most delicate fog that would move over the valley of the river. Or heavy stormy clouds racing over the edge of the valley… Favourite pins to catch her unruly hair that disrupted her work.”

He added that in his opinion, the spinner’s apprentice attended the funeral and during the ceremony threw a pebble with a carved face outline into the grave (archaeologists found such a pebble during excavations). 

He said: “She missed her. She, too, wanted to go where the Great Spinner went. Touch the threads again together and magic them into the weaving of fabrics.

Since the death of the Master, she knew that she would no longer be able to do this magic with her as before. She saw only one goal… The next day, a fisherman walking towards the river saw a small body floating on the waves.”

After the apparent suicide, the spinner’s apprentice was buried in the same barrow where the Great Spinner had been buried. 

Michałowski said: “For her journey, she received her whorls, reminiscent of flowers or stars hanging on the riverside sky on a summer night, and a small distaff. A small S-shaped clasp glimmered in her burnt remains. A small bowl rested in a dug pit.”

He added: “Only the stone with a face really knows the truth.”

At the site of a new apartment building, a mass burial of 18th century plague victims was discovered.

An 18th-century cemetery containing the remains of plague victims has been uncovered during an apartment build in northern Poland. The grim discovery was made after builders stumbled upon human remains during work at the site in Mikołajki in the Warmian-Maurian Voivodeship.

The find included two cemeteries, one dating between the 17th -19th century and a second from the 18th century when a plague swept through the Mazurian region.

Archaeologist Agnieszka Jaremek vice-president of the Dajna Foundation said: “It is mentioned in sources that there was not enough space in the cemetery by the church and that’s why victims were buried by the road leading to Mrągowo.

“Everything points to the fact that we have uncovered that place.

“Many graves conceal whole families – both adults and children.”

So far the remains of 100 people have been uncovered in 60 graves.

Known as the Great Northern War plague of 1700–1721, the epidemic swept across what is now northern Poland and other parts of Central Eastern Europe killing hundreds of thousands.

After the plague, near to the graves of victims, further dead were buried and burials could have taken place there until the start of the 19th century.

In these graves, archaeologists uncovered items such as buttons.

Joanna Sobolewska, director of the Department for the Protection of Monuments in Olsztyn said that the uncovered human remains would be subjected to tests and anthropological analysis and after the end of tests, they would probably be buried in a communal grave. “The issue of the exact burial place is a question for the future”, she said.

The site also concealed the remains of a Neolithic settlement and during works lasting several weeks, archaeologists from the Dajna Foundation in the name of Jerzy Okulicz-Kozaryn discovered remains from the Roman period.

Archaeologists think it is possible that the site was chosen for a settlement due to its proximity to a lake on one side and flat terrain on the other and according to estimates, the settlement could have occupied an area of 30-50 acres.

The Dajna Foundation’s Jaremek said: “Among the artefacts which we found are elements of ceramic plates as well as a blue glass bead.”

5,000-year-old grave reveals mass murder of Bronze Age family

Despite the fact that all 15 people discovered in a Bronze Age mass grave in southern Poland were killed by a head blow, their bodies were buried together with great care and consideration.

Genetic evidence now indicates that these people belonged to the same extended family, providing new light on a tumultuous period in European prehistory.

In 2011, a tragic grave near the southern Polish village of Koszyce was found. The remains of 15 men, women, and infants, as well as valuable grave goods, were found in the grave, which was radiocarbon dated to between 2880 and 2776 BCE. Many of the skeletons had sustained serious cranial trauma.

The reason for the killings could not be determined, with archaeologists at the time suggesting these individuals were murdered during a raid on their settlement.

To shed more light on this mystery, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, the University of Aarhus, and the Archaeological Museum in Poznan, Poland, conducted a genetic analysis of the remains.

The results, published late last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests all but one of these individuals were closely related, and that the individuals were positioned in the grave according to their kin relationships.

All 15 skulls exhibited fatal cranial fractures. No defensive wounds, such as injuries to the upper limbs, were detected, which suggests these individuals were captured and executed, and not killed in hand-to-hand combat, according to the new study.

Importantly, the new evidence suggests these people, who are associated with the Globular Amphora Culture (a group that lived in central Europe from around 3300 to 2700 BCE), were not genetically related to a neighbouring group known as the Corded Ware Culture. 

The researchers still aren’t sure what happened, but they guess that the killings were territorial in nature. This particular time period marked the transition from the Late Neolithic period to the Bronze Age, as early farmers were developing more complex societies.

But it was also a turbulent and violent time, as European cultures were coming into contact with incoming cultures from the east, including from the Asian steppe. The expansion of the Corded Ware groups may have resulted in this gruesome incident.

“We know from other gravesite discoveries that violent conflicts played out among different cultural groups at this time,” archaeologist Niels Johannsen of Aarhus University said in a University of Copenhagen press release. “However, they have never been as clearly documented as here. All the violence and tragedy aside, our study clearly demonstrates that family unity and care meant a lot for these people, some 5,000 years ago, both in life and in death.”

Indeed, the new genetic analysis identified these 15 individuals as part of a large extended family. Overall, four nuclear families were documented—mothers and children for the most part. The individuals were buried according to family relationships; mothers were buried with their children, and siblings were positioned next to each other.

The oldest individual, for example, was buried alongside her two sons, aged 5 and 15. A woman in her early 30s was buried with her teenage daughter and 5-year-old son. Four boys, all brothers, were laid down next to each other. Clearly, the bodies were buried by someone who knew the deceased.

Importantly, fathers and older male relatives were missing from the grave, “suggesting that it might have been them who buried their kin,” wrote the authors in the new study.

“Our suggestion is that they weren’t at the settlement when the massacre occurred and that they returned later, and subsequently buried their families in a respectful way,” said biologist Morten Allentoft of the University of Copenhagen in a statement.

Only one individual, an adult female, was not genetically related to anyone in the group. However, she was positioned in the grave close to a young man, which suggests “she may have been as close to him in life as she was in death,” wrote the authors.

“The presence of unrelated females and related males in the grave is interesting because it suggests that the community at Koszyce was organized along patrilineal lines of descent, adding to the mounting evidence that this was the dominant form of social organization among Late Neolithic communities in Central Europe,” the authors wrote in the study.

Typically, patrilineal societies are associated with the practice of women marrying outside of their social group and residing with the man’s family (i.e. female exogamy). Several previous studies have suggested that patrilineal domestic arrangements did in fact prevail in several parts of Central Europe during the Late Neolithic, according to the new paper.

A brutal episode from a particularly brutal period in human history. It’s a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on Game of Thrones, but unfortunately, this tragedy was all too real.

Bronze Age Burials Found in Sandbox in Poland

Children playing in a sandpit in southwest Poland discovered human bones inside ancient urns. After local students began digging about with a bucket and shovel just below the pit’s surface in the village of Tuchola arska, the terrible discovery was found.

Experts believe the find dates as far back as the Bronze Age and that it comes from the Lusatian culture from around 1100-700 BC.

Local archaeology inspector Marcin Kosowicz said: “While digging in a sandpit, the children came across one or two extensive corpse graves of the Lusatian culture community.

“The graves were located very shallowly under the surface of the soil and the overlying sand and for this reason, some of the vessels are fragmented.

“The removal of a considerable part of humus took place during the levelling of the ground for the construction of the playing field with heavy equipment, which could have damaged the vessels.”

He added that the location of the discovery may be linked to an earlier archaeological site nearby which is listed in the provincial heritage protection register.

Kosowicz said: “Due to the fact that its location is marked on a map on a scale of 1:25 000, which is characterised by low precision, it is possible that the grave that the children discovered is closely connected to this site.

“According to local people, a few dozen years ago, during the construction of a pond and a fence on the premises of the neighbouring State Agricultural Farm, bronze artefacts and ceramic vessels were discovered.

“Unfortunately, at this stage, it has not been possible to establish the further fate of these artefacts.”

The Lusatian culture existed in the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age around 1300 BC to 500 BC. The name Lusatia refers to an area in eastern Germany and western Poland.

The Lubusz heritage protection office has said that rescue archaeological excavations will be carried out at the site of the discovery.

Their main aim will be to secure the monuments that have been left behind.