ABSTRACT
A few settlements have been recently excavated a little more than 50 km to the southeast, on the right bank of the Middle Oder River, next to the border between the present-day voivodeships of Greater Poland and Lubusz. Farther to the south and southeast, with no finds in Silesia except a few settlements that have been hastily dated to the late 5th or early 6th century on the basis of pottery alone, one can surmise a severe depopulation of the region, not unlike that of Pomerania. For no part of East Central Europe other than Poland has the reconstruction of early Slavic history depended so much upon the typology and chronology of pottery. Because Michal Parczewski’s was the first taxonomy in the region, most subsequent authors have relied upon comparison with the Polish material. Many have also assumed that Parczewski’s taxonomy, in and of itself, was a proof that the early Slavs had come to Poland from Ukraine.
