ABSTRACT
In this region of Poland the mixture of Globe-amphora, Corded-ware, and Funnel-beaker elements took a particularly fertile form in what is known as the Zlota culture. All three traditions are manifest in the pottery, side by side at first (the funnel-beaker kept for domestic use) and then blending; crescent-handled pottery recalling Moravia and Galicia (p. 209) appears too, since the culture ran a parallel course to the Danubian Copper Age, but in its initial phase, around 2100 B.C., this area witnessed the start of the northward movements of invasion which carried the ‘ boat* type of battle-axe and round bodied cord-ornamented pottery to the Baltic, just as at the same time (p. 217) the Saxo-Thuringian warrior invasion carried to Holstein and Jutland the battle-axes and corded beakers of the Single-grave culture. It is often said that the Fatyanovo culture of Central Russia also originated with a migration from Poland, but its pottery lacks the Cordedbeaker element prominent at Zlota, and is far more purely in the Globe-amphora tradition, while we have already seen how directly its drooping-bladed battle-axes point to the south and
the Caucasus. In fact, recognition of west-to-east connexions across the Russian forests, attested, e.g., by the spread of ‘ boat-axes’ (p. 227), leaves the actual origin of the Fatyanovo people to be accounted for in the main by movement straight from the south, by which a group of steppe warriors brought the battle-axe, corded globular pottery, and ochre-burial to dominate the primitive comb-ware population of forested Russia. The tradition so set up there had a long life, and played a leading part in the Russian Bronze Age and even later; but the distinct invasions of the Baltic lands from Poland had a different though analogous history. Round bodied corded pottery appears first on the southern Baltic coast in East Prussia, and the island of Bornholm has produced not only derivative pot-forms but boat-shaped battle-axes which take us further oversea to the ‘ Boat-axe culture’ which thus invaded the south of Sweden. The course of its develop ment there must be described later, but PI. VII, 13 shows its highly specialized form of boat-axe, with metal-derived ‘ seam’ and shaft-tube, and the round-bodied pots which with this and the thick-butted flint axe characterize its earth-dug single graves look to Poland, not only in their shape but the wave like arrangement of their earlier cord-omament. Finally, east of the Baltic a similar movement passed up the coast to Finland, where fringed-pattem corded pottery, distinct from the Swedish but looking also to Poland, and a separate boat-axe development, attest the invaders’ arrival at a period answering to an advanced stage of the native comb ware (p. 203). The pottery-traditions fused in the hybrid Kiukais style, and inland and in neighbouring Karelia the idea of the battle-axe, in time entered into the animal art of the Arctic hunters, to produce the strangely beautiful beast-headed axes and axe-like sculptures in fine stone which have sometimes been found in their dwellingsites and places of animal sacrifice (PI. VI, 1: p. 205).
