Całowanie. A Final Paleolithic and Early Mesolithic Site on an Island in the Ancient Vistula Channel

The Pękatka Hill of Całowanie, a small sandy mound surrounded by the Całowanie Moor, a large expanse of wetlands filling a Late Glacial fossil Vistula Valley, is a place where artifacts of nearly 40 Final Paleolithic occupation units lay buried in alluvial and dune sands and peat bogs. Most of the units were left by small groups of the Stone Age hunter-gatherers making uncountable and recurrent visits to the same spot, drawn by many attractions of the contiguous areas. The Pękatka Hill preserved a 5000-year long dormant record of their world.

The present book, offered to the gracious readers, attempts to put together all the information gathered during many years of excavations, field and lab work and writing. Changing environments, lithology and the dynamics of sediment deposition on the hill and in the surrounding marshes is quite well mirrored by the functional makeups of flint tool kits and spatial histories of core processing, tool repair, and discard. It also tells us that the seasonality of landscape use and, therefore, camping was the major name of the game in those remote times as well as throughout all of prehistory.

Romuald Schild