Link to this video on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBRh7sIHw7E
Location GPS of Wietrzychowice
52°24'32.2"N 18°52'31.4"E
(52.408953, 18.875379)
Location GPS of Sarnowo
52°29'12.5"N 18°45'14.3"E
(52.486807, 18.753957)
Location GPS of Gaj
52°23'03.6"N 18°44'43.2"E
(52.384331, 18.745329)
Text from the video
Hello. I present to you my second video in English. This time I’m going to take you again to Poland, but over 5,000 years ago.
Recently, archaeologists have discovered one of the largest megalithic cemeteries in Poland just dated to about 5.5 thousand years BP. It is located in the village Dębiany in the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship . Archaeological work is just beginning here. A more accurate name for these tombs is megaxillons because their basic structure was made of wood. The tombs discovered in Dębiany were built from the soil in the shape of a very elongated trapezoid, 40-50 m long. Contrary to the megalithic tombs known from Kujawy, their walls were surrounded not with boulders, but with wooden pillars. The longer of the remaining trapezoidal walls contained the entrance to a kind of tomb chapel - a vestibule. Some of the graves under the earthwork had a limestone structure. The case is new, so little more is known about these tombs for the time being. To bring you closer to the topic, I translated into English my video about the megalithic cemeteries from Wietrzychowice and Sarnowo in Kujawy, also in Poland. Below the film are coordinates GPS, to help in identifying the cemeteries in Kujawy.
We enter the megalithic cemetery in Wietrzychowice. The cemetery belonged to the population who lived in this area 6000 - 4000 years ago and is called the Funnel Beaker Culture. Here, that is, practically all over Poland. They left behind at least several hundred such megaliths, because so many were described in the 19th century. The first tomb emerges from behind the trees, arousing curiosity, and its mysteriousness almost makes you shudder. It must be admitted that the people of this distant past had a sense of a monumental mystery affecting the psyche. The tomb that appears in front of us, one of five in this cemetery, is 76 m long and 10 m wide in the frontal part. Originally it was much taller, with some 3-4 meters in front. There were 7 large stones embedded in the forehead, and the spaces between them were filled with smaller stones. The stones, smaller and smaller, surround the whole tombs, narrowing towards the rear. There are 400-600 boulders in each of the megaliths in Wietrzychowice. If the stone was too high, it was dug deeper, if it was too low, it was placed on a stone pad.
A gap was left between the boulders in the forehead of the tomb, which was probably the location of an entrance to the cult wooden chamber. Inside the first megalith, two stone pavements were discovered so probably 2 people were buried here. The bones haven’t survived. In each tomb of this cemetery mostly 1 or 2 people were buried. Everywhere where you can identify, they were men. In megaliths archaeologists found clay vessels, often accompanied by charcoal.
And here is the tomb No. 2. Its length is 93 meters, and the width of the forehead is 9 meters. One person was buried in it - a man about 50 years old, laid directly on the ground. Of course, these individual people had to be someone special for the community, because despite the registered large number of such megaliths in Poland, there were too few of them for all people living around over the centuries. Ordinary members of the community were buried in ordinary graves, there was also a cremation ritual. By the way - thanks to aerial laser scanning, a large cemetery with several well-preserved megaliths was discovered in the forest, or actually near the forest, east of the village Góry in Wielkopolska.
Now I am going to show you the longest tomb in Wietrzychowice. Its length is 115 m. Let's walk along this megalith, starting from the "tail". Two people were buried inside its imposing structure. One of the burials was found in front of the entrance, and the other was found a little deeper, to the right. Both were surrounded by stones, but the more central one was larger and more carefully arranged. Additionally, a flint knife was found near the central skeleton. This tomb hides a mystery, as if there was little mystery in the existence of the megaliths themselves. In its interior, next to the burials and directly above them, archaeologists found a cluster of pieces of pottery, flint tools and broken human and animal bones mixed with charcoal. Sensation! - Looks like a funeral human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. Let's control the frisky emotions - maybe it's not cannibalism, but a later burial in the megalith? How do you think? Or maybe you know something about it? Let me know in the comment.
This cemetery has one more mysterious curiosity - in the tomb marked with the number 5, according to the information board next to the megalith, two men were buried, who had been treated with a trepanation of the skull. They both survived this procedure, and I would like to add that one of them underwent it four times. The men died much later of natural causes. Here is the question - where does the simultaneity of the deaths of both people with traces of trepanation of the skull come from, allowing them to be buried in one tomb? In addition, special people for whom an impressive megalith was built.
Now let's take a look at Sarnowo. This burial ground contains 9 megaliths. One to 5 people are buried in each. The principle of building tombs was similar to those in Wietrzychowice, so I’m going to focus on two curiosities. As in Wietrzychowice, one of the tombs, apart from the main burial of a single person, contained broken human bones, some of them burned. The bones belonged to several people. Of course, again the question is whether it was a sacrifice accompanying the funeral or a later burial connected with a different cultural rite. Often happened that the later peoples inhabiting the territory, looking at some very old tombs, noticed the sacred associated with them and also buried their dead in these places, noticeably holy for them.
The second curiosity from Sarnowo are two female burials, the unique for the Kuyavian megaliths, both are in Sarnowo. One of the women was buried with several people, while the other - and this burial is more interesting - a megalith was specially built for her. This burial is also different from all the others because the woman was buried across the main axis of the tomb, which is also unique because the rest of the people were buried along the main axis. The woman was probably buried in a coffin made of a hollow tree trunk, which is the third difference compared to the other megalithic burials. All other persons were buried on the ground or on stone pavements, generally surrounded by stones. The woman's skeleton was quite well preserved, so it was possible to say that she was 157 cm tall, but her spine was so distorted that she had to move heavily hunched over in her lifetime. She died at the age of 50-70.
Enjoying a few more moments of walking around the cemetery, I will add that this local culture from the late Stone Age used wheeled carts, because that's how archaeologists interpret the drawing on the vase found in Bronocice. It also means that they had roads on which such a vehicle could travel. People lived in light wooden structures. These people didn’t have to settle next to the rivers because they set up wooden, timbered wells, about which in 1936 was written by prof. Konrad Jeżdżewski. The interesting striped flint mine in Krzemionki Opatowskie is also an initiative of the Funnel Beaker Culture.
By the way - what grew in the present Kujawy 5500 years ago? The climate was temperate, warm and humid. The dominant tree species was pine – so the surroundings of those prehistoric people might have looked a bit like what you can see among these tombs. In those days there were also oaks, ash trees, maples and lindens. During the work, archaeologists found alder cones and hazelnuts.
Recently, in the neighborhood of the tombs in Kujawy, archaeologists have identified more than 150 settlements dating back to the megalithic era. These villages were small. Up to 10 families lived in each of them. Residential buildings had an average area of 25-35 sq m. There was a group of settlements in the vicinity of each cemetery. Many bone remains, mainly belonging to cows, have been discovered in the area of settlements and a much smaller number of pigs and sheep or goats. This means that mainly cattle were eaten, say scientists.
Experts also examined pollen of plants in the territory around the old-time villages - multi-meter cores were collected from old lakes. Based on their analysis, they made a surprising finding. It turned out that the degree of deforestation around the former settlements was not as high as assumed. It follows that the expansion towards the natural environment was not large and perhaps the focus was on livestock rather than agriculture.
Finally, let's see one more monumental tomb of the discussed culture. There is a field of maize next to a pretty forester's lodge in Gaj in Kujawy. That's it. Here is a path in the corn field, which you enter directly opposite the forester's lodge. You should follow the path into the corn field, and after a while a fantastic view will appear before our eyes - the face of a megalithic tomb from several thousand years ago! The maize frame further enhances the mood of the place. The tomb makes a great impression, but imagine how impressive it must have looked in the past, because it was originally 3-4 meters high in the forehead, and in the 19th century 2 tombs were here.
The tomb that you are watching at originally was probably 150 meters long and its tail stretched deep into this field. It was the largest of the Kuyavian megaliths.
Okay. I will tell you more at a mini picnic with coffee. Sitting down to the meal, well, in the cemetery, according to the old custom, we pour a few drops of coffee on the ground to respect the ancestors. I don’t know if this popular custom was used at that time , especially since our ancestors didn’t drink coffee, but it doesn’t matter. Symbolically respect for the hosts of this place was shown.
Two people were buried in the tomb. One closer to an entrance on the thirteenth meter from the front of the tomb, and the second on the thirty-third meter. The skeleton of the first person was found covered with a white, calcareous mass. The building was roughly twice as tall as what we see. In such tombs between the boulders on the forehead and the first burial was a wooden chamber. The floor of that chamber was made of a smooth clay, sometimes fired. And behind this chamber the dead were buried. The wooden chamber, had a cavity in the center containing broken dishes and some charcoal. Of course, such a cavity was also found in Gaj. In addition, archaeologists found these wooden buildings burned. In Gaj, the wooden "room" in the megalith was used more than once, which was discovered by Dr. Piotr Papiernik. Carbon 14 dating indicated that the youngest reconstruction of the wooden chamber occurred some 200-300 years after the main burial. Maybe it was time to bury the second body from the tomb? And was the wooden room set on fire after each funeral?
Dr. Piotr Papiernik from the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Łódź wonders: "The elite was buried in monumental tombs, but we do not know mass cemeteries from this area. And somewhere these tens of thousands of people, from many generations, must have been buried. Our next goal is their location".
This is where I end my story. I encourage you to subscribe this channel to not miss the next video in English. Bye.
Bibliography:
Information boards at cemeteries.
Makiewicz T., Cmentarzysko grobowców kujawskich w Wietrzychowicach, pow. Koło, Sprawozdania Archeologiczne, T. XXI, Wrocław 1969
Documentary "MEGALITY Historia Sprzed 5500 lat" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DORM3KxSbc4&t=14s (dostęp 22.03.2021)
https://naukawpolsce.pap.pl/aktualnosci/news%2C86640%2Cswietokrzyskie-archeolog-w-debianach-odkrylismy-jedno-z-najwiekszych (dostęp 22.03.2021)
https://naukawpolsce.pap.pl/aktualnosci/news%2C86682%2Ckujawy-archeolodzy-odkryli-osady-budowniczych-grobowcow-polskich-piramid (dostęp 22.03.2021)
Piotr Papiernik, Joanna Wicha, Rafał Brzejszczak, Piotr Kittel, Piotr Wroniecki "Źródła archeologiczne w rejonie Parku Kulturowego Wietrzychowice" ("Archaeological Sources in the Region of Wietrzychowice Culture Park")
Megaliths from Wietrzychowice:
