The Chelmno were one of the northernmost communities of the Lusatian culture, a people who lived in Central Europe during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, from around 1300 to 400 BC. Agriculture was the main way of subsistence for the Lusatian people, although their great passion seems to have been metal objects.
For decades it was believed that the Chelmno were the ugly ducklings, the different ones, the ones who did not follow the established rules. "Unlike the widespread metal hoarding seen in the more southern regions of Lusatia, metal did not appear to have figured prominently in the social and ritual activities of the Chelmno community," say researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University.
Now, however, an excavation at the dry lake Pakowo Biskupie in north-central Poland has revealed more than 550 bronze artifacts, predominantly arm and neck ornaments, along with prehistoric skeletal human remains. Experts believe that the entire complex is part of a ritual of offering to the gods and could even indicate the existence of human sacrifices.
As archaeologists explain in an article published in the journal Antiquity, it has been difficult to obtain evidence of the widespread deposition of treasures by the Chelmno group and that is why until now it was believed that, unlike other Lusatian communities, they did not seem to have allocated a lot of ritual meaning to the metal.
This idea began to be called into question when metal detectorists discovered hundreds of bronze objects on the lake bed along with the bones of at least 33 people (including babies, children, adolescents and adults under 50 of both sexes). From these findings, researchers have even been able to reconstruct a possible costume worn by a woman from the Chelmno group.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the placement of human remains in the lake occurred before the deposition of the metal, showing the possibility that this community initially buried their dead in lakes before moving on to making offerings of metal objects.
Among the finds stands out a multi-strand necklace composed of tubular and oval-shaped beads interspersed with several swallowtail pendants and a single glass bead (Ringaugenperle) with low magnesium content that can be traced back to its origin in the eastern Mediterranean. , through workshops in present-day Italy, Slovenia and Croatia, and along the trade route that ran through eastern Germany during the Hallstatt D period, 700 to 500 BC.
Also recovered were nail-shaped earrings, probably originating in western Ukraine, a flint spearhead, and antler artifacts, one of which was fixed in an iron socket and decorated with leaded bronze inlays, which are believed to be adds to the body of evidence that deer were ideologically important to the Lusatian people. The human bones have a marshy patina and are severely fragmented and disarticulated.
“These findings highlight a potential link between human sacrifice and metal artifacts in lakes during the late prehistory of Central Europe. Importantly, this association suggests that, while the Chelmno initially differed from the rest of Lusatian culture in their ritual practices, their belief system later aligned with that of the rest of the region,” they explain.
According to the authors, this discovery has completely changed the way the group should be viewed, "making the Pakowo Biskupie site one of the most eloquent testimonies of ritual activity from the Lusatian period in Poland."
