Urnfields in the middle Oder basin – a perspective of a Lubusz-Greater Polish territorial community

Abstract

Summary Lusatian Urnfield communities inhabiting Lubusz Land and western Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages occupy a unique position on the settlement map of the middle Oder basin. For nearly a thousand years, they acted as a kind of buffer between the buoyant Silesian centre, which had achieved its culture-making role thanks to direct exchange contacts with the Transcarpathian and Danubian-Alpine centres of the south, and West Pomeranian groups inspired from the west and northwest by the Nordic circle. The importance of Lubusz-Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) populations to the overall cultural picture of the territories on the banks of the Oder River can hardly be overestimated, so it is worth analysing this phenomenon in more detail. One of the significant cultural elements is the ceramic style. It can be a means of manifesting outside the identity of a group, the identity consolidated by a tradition functioning within this group. It is hard to imagine a relative standardisation of patterns in pottery produced over a certain area to be only the result of more or less random movement of female potters or small groups of people. The standardisation of material culture, resulting from the existence of a style, no doubt enhances homogeneity and stability in everyday life, and therefore can be regarded as a factor integrating neighbouring communities in territorial communities within a supra-local scale. In the Late Bronze Age, in Lubusz Land and western Greater Poland (Wielkopolska), one can notice the same stylistic tendencies in pottery manufacture (bossed style, Urad style, Late Bronze Age style) and in figural art in clay, and a similar repertoire of bronze objects, produced in local metallurgical workshops on the Oder. The formation of Urnfield communities in Lubusz Land and western Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) was no doubt part of a broader process of cultural integration, of supra-local character, which was taking place throughout the upper and middle Oder basin at the transition of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. This was a process of acculturation, based on the reception of the influx of new cultural contents along the River Oder from Lower Silesia and perhaps, although to a much smaller extent, from Lusatia and Saxony. The result was the cultural unification, for the first time to such an extent, of the western part of what is now Poland. The archaeological indicator of the discussed process was the appearance of large cremation cemeteries, with burials furnished with bossed pottery of the Silesia-Greater Polish type, representing a style typical of most of the middle Oder basin. Similar tendencies can be seen in bronze metallurgy, where a nearly complete unification of the repertoire of produced objects can be observed from the beginning of the Late Bronze Age. Here, however, the distributions of particular forms are much broader and encompass almost the entire western part of the Lusatian Urnfields. In Lubusz Land and western Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) the Late Bronze Age saw a very dynamic development of local bronze production, performed primarily within the Oder metallurgical centre. The result was a relatively high percentage of bronze artefacts in the cultural inventory of Urnfield populations inhabiting the region, most of them ultimately deposited in the many hoards buried during that period. A broad spectrum of manufactured designs, their notable standardisation, and the finds of durable casting moulds all seem to confirm that bronze metallurgy, along with pot-making, belonged to the most important areas of production performed by the population inhabiting the middle Oder basin at the conclusion of the 2nd and beginning of the 1st millennium BC, despite it having been carried out by a limited group of initiated specialists. The process of formation of Lusatian Urnfields in the middle Oder basin was most likely not complete before HaA2, and from the subsequent phase onwards one can notice a steady expansion of settled areas, resulting from intensive internal colonisation and the processes of acculturation. The dynamics of this phenomenon are best illustrated by newly established, vast cremation cemeteries, most of which were then continuously used at least until the close of the Bronze Age, with some persisting into the Early Iron Age. With the onset of the Early Iron Age, the Lubusz-Greater Polish territorial community of Lusatian Urnfields started to slowly disintegrate, a phenomenon explained by the adoption of a different model of Hallstatisation by these communities. In Lubusz Land, pottery of the Górzyce style (Göritzer Stil) appears, inspired more by Białowice (Billendorf) than Silesian patterns, while in western Greater Poland (Wielkopolska) ceramic workshops still maintained a close connection with the tendencies set by their Silesian neighbours, who at that time closely followed the East Hallstatt trends. The Lubusz-Greater Polish territorial community, which crystallised and developed throughout the entirety of the Late Bronze Age largely thanks to the unique role of the Oder River as a route of long-distance exchange and at the same time a culturally unifying element of the landscape, ceased to exist with the onset of the Early Iron Age, never to be reborn.