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In recent years, the region of Starogard Lake District in northern Poland has seen a growing interest in the Funnel Beaker culture, including the research on local flintworking, which has fed the discussion on the traffic in “exotic” flint in the younger phases of the Funnel Beaker settlement in the region (3650-3100 calBC). In this study, lithic assemblages from the Starogard Lake District are screened for “imported” flint artefacts to determine the parent rock material used for their production and monitor their frequencies in the local assemblages. By exploring the use-wear analysis results, we also investigate the production and consumption patterns of the local and “imported” flint artefacts from the Chełmno land and the Starogard Lake District. The obtained results were confronted with comparative data from other parts of the Eastern Group and confirming the marginal position of the Eastern Pomerania region in the “exotic” flint trading network during the Funnel Beaker era in Poland.

This work reports the results of an interdisciplinary study seeking to address the issue of bone tempering in the Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture from the territory that is today Poland. In this paper we contribute to this debate by closely examining the geochemical characteristics (using INAA, ICP-MS, SEM-EDS, γ-ray spectrometry and OM) of six ceramic vessels collected from the archaeological site in Kaldus, northern Poland. Particular emphasis is placed on the need to clarify whether the bones in the pottery from Kaldus were deliberately added or incidentally incorporated in a clay paste. Through exploring the chemical, mineralogical and petrographic composition of ceramics, we also investigate whether different pastes were used contemporarily by potters from Kaldus for different types of wares during the mid-4th millennium BC. The results has allowed us to hypothesise a local provenance of the bone-tempered vase from Kaldus. Furthermore, the TRB potters’ choices to add crushed and burned bones to a clay paste seemed to lack a technological basis. Rather, it appears that a temper made of bones had strong symbolic associations and was most likely ritualised in the working memory of the TRB potters from Kaldus, or even the entire TRB East Group milieu.

Human history has been shaped by global dispersals of technologies, although understanding of what enabled these processes is limited. Here, we explore the behavioural mechanisms that led to the emergence of pottery among hunter-gatherer communities in Europe during the mid-Holocene. Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought. Chemical characterization of organic residues shows that European hunter-gatherer pottery had a function structured around regional culinary practices rather than environmental factors. Analysis of the forms, decoration and technological choices suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission. We demonstrate a correlation between the physical properties of pots and how they were used, reflecting social traditions inherited by successive generations of hunter-gatherers. Taken together the evidence supports kinship-driven, super-regional communication networks that existed long before other major innovations such as agriculture, writing, urbanism or metallurgy.

The article contains an assessment of the current state of recognition of the phenomenon present in the Neolithic of Polish lands, and referred to as the Eastern European sub-Neolithic. The picture it represents is does not provide grounds for optimism. The causes of the bad situation are outlined. The paper presents recent achievements and basic gaps in the evidence, among which the most important is the lack of research at potentially homogeneous sites. This make impossible to undertake the discussion of the problem of the local genesis of the phenomenon, the chronology and dynamics of its transformations or broader considerations on the character and the scope of interactions between pottery-producing hunter-gatherers and early agricultural communities. Interwoven into the narratives have become the views of Jan Kowalczyk (1969), in which the sub-Neolithic had an important role in the processes ongoing in the Neolithic period. The purpose of references to texts from half a century ago is not the desire to return to the general concepts of this researcher, but rather to consider the accurate and still valid specific observations of J. Kowalczyk and about the conviction expressed by him that a better understanding of the sub-Neolithic is important for discovering and comprehension of the processes occurring in the Neolithic of Polish territories (understood as a period).

Throughout the long history of the Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture in the region of modern Poland (4100–3100 BCE) we can observe how local farming communities interacted with the wild world and how deer species became an important ideological resource for the TRB people. Biomolecular and histomorphometric evidence from two archaeological sites in central Poland add new information for a better understanding of these multi-layered interactions. Our findings fuel a discussion of deer valorisation during the TRB era in Poland, showing that the dagger from Slawecinek was made from the bone of a red deer or elk and may have served as a clan accessory. Furthermore, the results indicate that a likely candidate for the bone used to temper the ceramic vessel from Kaldus is red deer, which allowed us to speculate that the utilisation of bone-tempered pottery by the local TRB farmers may possibly reflect the magical domestication of cervids.

In the article, the author discusses and accepts the need to rejuvenate the chronology of the beginnings of the Funnel Beaker culture in the Polish Plain which should be then dated to about 4200/4100 years BC. While accepting such an approach, the author presents also some of its consequences – e.g. multi-stylistic of pottery and variability of environments inhabited by the earliest Funnel Beaker communities. The article also presents some suggestions concerning the participation of huntergatherers and early agrarian groups in the shaping of this culture in the Polish lowlands. It also raises some questions, which, under the new chronological circumstances, await further archaeometric data and proper discussion.