The finds were made during excavations in the northern part of early medieval Wolin known as Srebrne Wzgórze, or Silver Hill, a district believed to have housed a market and craft workshops in the settlement’s early period.
“We uncovered four hut remains built in a way we have not previously seen in Wolin,” said Dr. Wojciech Filipowiak of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who led the excavation season. He said three more structures were found in poorer condition.
The huts appear as square platforms made of clay and sand, surrounded by a ditch. Each is roughly five by five meters. Some contain evidence of a hearth, others of an oven. The buildings sit very close together, with only a narrow drainage ditch, about 50 centimeters wide, separating them, Filipowiak said.
Researchers believe the structures date to the 11th or 12th century, a period that has been poorly documented archaeologically in Wolin. The settlement is known to have existed from at least the late 8th century and, by the mid-9th century, it had become a major center on the southern Baltic, tied to long-distance trade and contacts between Slavic and Scandinavian worlds.
Filipowiak said the team suspects that older remains may lie beneath the newly uncovered huts. He said they are convinced that below the structures could be traces of a 9th- or 10th-century waterfront, possibly linked to port infrastructure.
Alongside the buildings, archaeologists recovered tens of thousands of fragments of pottery and animal bones, as well as more than 500 items including Norwegian whetstones, glass beads, metal ornaments, and vessels bearing distinctive marks.
The meaning of the marks remains unclear. Filipowiak called it a long-standing puzzle in early medieval archaeology, with competing explanations ranging from “magical” symbols to potters’ marks passed down through families.
The discoveries are expected to feed into a new three-year research project led by scientists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Denmark’s Aarhus University. The researchers aim to learn more about the role Vikings may have played in the emergence of Wolin and to pinpoint the location of the town’s early medieval ports.
Next year, the team also plans to revisit material from excavations carried out on Silver Hill in the 1960s, work made possible by a grant from Poland’s National Programme for the Development of Humanities. Those earlier digs uncovered a boat-shaped hut and a hearth containing intentionally elongated human skulls, a practice more commonly associated with parts of South America. Researchers have described it as a singular find for early medieval Poland, and key questions remain unanswered, including who the individuals were and why the remains were placed in a hearth.
Filipowiak said the combined reanalysis of older finds and new fieldwork could alter assumptions about how Wolin developed. One possibility, he suggested, is that the settlement did not simply grow outward from a single center. Instead, a Slavic community may have lived in the core area while Scandinavians settled at some distance, close enough to maintain contact.
The island is a hub of cultural activity, celebrating mediaeval history and customs, with the Festival of Slavs and Vikings, one of Europe's largest reenactment festivals, now in its 30th year. Polish and Danish archeologists have worked the area for some time.
The recent work in Wolin was financed with support from the Salling Foundation and the Aarhus University Research Foundation.
(rt)
Source: PAP