Bronocice pot

The Bronocice pot is a ceramic vase incised with one of the earliest known depictions of what may be a wheeled vehicle. It was discovered in the village of Bronocice near the Nidzica River in Poland. Attributed to the Funnelbeaker archaeological culture, radiocarbon tests dated the pot to the mid-fourth millennium BCE. Today it is housed at the Archaeological Museum of Kraków in southern Poland. The pot was discovered between 1974 and 1976 during the archaeological excavation of a large Neolithic settlement in Bronocice, ca. 50 km to north east of Kraków. The excavations were carried out between 1974 and 1980 by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York at Buffalo (United States). Sarunas Milisauskas, one of several archaeologists who worked on Bronocice excavation project wrote: "The 1974 field season yielded data beyond our expectations. An incised wagon motif was found on a Funnelbeaker vessel in a pit. An animal bone associated with the pot in the pit was dated by radiocarbon method, around 3400 BC (Bakker et al. 1999). The vessel represents one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the presence of wheeled wagons in Europe." Milisauskas, together with Janusz Kruk, attributed the Neolithic Bronocice findings to the Lublin-Volhynian culture (between 3100 and 2200 BC), "contemporary to the younger stage of the development of Tiszapolgar cycle in the Cisa River Basin... the culture is certainly older than the decadent period of the Funnelbeaker culture in Małopolska." The picture on the pot symbolically depicts key elements of the prehistoric human environment. The most important component of the decoration are five rudimentary representations of what seems to be a wagon. They represent a vehicle with a shaft for a draught animal, and four wheels. The lines connecting them probably represent axles. The circle in the middle possibly symbolizes a container for harvest. Other images on the pot include a tree, a river and what may be fields intersected by roads/ditches or the layout of a village.