Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
An axe's shape dates a nearly missed Polish grave 3,300 years before the cemetery around it
Archaeologists closing a dig near Żórawina noticed a four-metre circle in the soil and found 42 drilled teeth above a man's skeleton. The 2900 B.C.E. estimate rests on the shape of his battle axe until radiocarbon comes back.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- A University of Wrocław team was tidying up its excavation near Żórawina in southwestern Poland at the end of the season when it noticed a circle in the soil that looked like a burial mound.
- The central chamber held 42 teeth, each drilled through the root and still lying in the arrangement of a necklace, though the cord that joined them had rotted away.
- A man's almost complete skeleton emerged beneath the teeth as the team dug deeper into the chamber.
- The grave also held a stone battle axe and skull fragments from two other adults who may have been decapitated.
- The site outside Wrocław was already known for burials about 1,600 years old, from the end of the Roman period and the beginning of the Migration Period.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Any regional chronology that leans on this burial is leaning on the form of a single object, so the 3,300-year extension of the site's use holds only as far as typology holds until a radiocarbon range exists.
- decision Directors working sites already labelled with one period have a concrete reason to walk the surface for mound rings before closing down, since this feature was spotted during clearing and not during excavation.
- capability Teeth keep chemical traces of the environments where they formed. Strontium gives the team a route to where the man grew up and where the animals in the necklace ranged.
- precedent Another team's recent find of a similar mound at Iwiny leaves Lower Silesia with two candidates to compare, and that comparison is how the question of arrival from eastern Europe or the Caspian region gets tested.
The 2900 B.C.E. estimate comes from the shape of the axe [7]. That is a relative date. It places an object inside a known sequence of forms and inherits whatever slack the sequence carries. Radiocarbon dating sits on the list of planned tests, and no laboratory date has been reported [12][24]. Take the estimate as given and set it against the burials this site was already known for, about 1,600 years old [8]. The man went into the ground roughly 3,300 years before them [22].
Each of the 42 teeth had a hole drilled through the root, and the cord that once joined them was gone by the time the team reached the chamber [3]. "It was clear at first glance that this was no accident," said Paweł Dąbrowski, the anthropologist and anatomist at Wrocław Medical University who described the necklace in a translated press release [10]. Which animals the teeth came from is, so far, a judgement by eye: Dąbrowski suspects members of the dog family, bears, and hoofed mammals, and he raised the possibility that some are human [11].
The axe lay beneath the man's right elbow. It was made of serpentinite, and its chipped edge shows it had been used, possibly for hunting or fighting, Dąbrowski said [6]. The team, led by the University of Wrocław archaeologist Tomasz Gralak, also recovered amber beads, bone discs, and a flint blade from the grave [9]. Gralak and Dąbrowski think the man may have been a hunter, warrior, or head of a family, and that the large necklace reflected his importance to the community [21]. Those are readings of grave goods, and the source offers them as such.
The older phase of this cemetery turned up because a circle roughly four metres across was visible in the soil, and somebody looked at it while the team was tidying up at the end of the season [1][2]. The report covers that one grave [25].
Some bones were too fragile to lift on their own, so the team removed them inside the surrounding earth, and X-rays will show where the fragments lie before anyone starts uncovering them [17]. Wear on the man's teeth could indicate what he ate and how the food was prepared [16].
What to watch
- Radiocarbon results for the man and the two skulls: a lab date would replace the typological estimate and test whether all three were contemporaries.
- Dąbrowski's search for tool cuts on the skull fragments, the check that would support or drop the reading of the heads as offerings.
- DNA work on the three individuals: the team expects it to speak to relatedness, ancestry and biological sex.