The Bronocice pot ( Polish: ''Waza z Bronocic'') is a

ceramic A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant, and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcela ...

vase incised with one of the earliest known depictions of a

wheel A wheel is a rotating component (typically circular in shape) that is intended to turn on an axle Bearing (mechanical), bearing. The wheel is one of the key components of the wheel and axle which is one of the Simple machine, six simple machin ...

ed vehicle. It was discovered in the village of Bronocice near the Nidzica River in

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

. 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.

Discovery

The pot was discovered between 1974 and 1976 during the archaeological excavation of a large

Neolithic The Neolithic or New Stone Age (from Ancient Greek, Greek 'new' and 'stone') is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe and Africa (c. 10,000 BCE to c. 2,000 BCE). It saw the Neolithic Revo ...

settlement in Bronocice, ca. 50 km to north east of

Kraków , officially the Royal Capital City of Kraków, is the List of cities and towns in Poland, second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city has a population of 804,237 ...

. The excavations were carried out between 1974 and 1980 by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology,

Polish Academy of Sciences The Polish Academy of Sciences (, PAN) is a Polish state-sponsored institution of higher learning. Headquartered in Warsaw, it is responsible for spearheading the development of science across the country by a society of distinguished scholars a ...

and the

State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY ) is a system of Public education, public colleges and universities in the New York (state), State of New York. It is one of the List of largest universities and university networks by enrollment, larges ...

in the 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 BCE (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

Bronocice findings to the Lublin-Volhynian culture (between 3100 and 2200 BCE), "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."

Inscription

The picture on the pot symbolically depicts key elements of the

prehistoric Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use o ...

human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are Hominidae, great apes characterized by their Prehistory of nakedness and clothing ...

environment. The most important component of the decoration are five rudimentary representations of what seems to be a

wagon A wagon (or waggon) is a heavy four-wheeled vehicle pulled by Working animal#Draft animals, draft animals or on occasion by humans, used for transporting goods, commodities, agricultural materials, supplies and sometimes people. Wagons are i ...

. They represent a vehicle with a shaft for a draught animal, and four wheels. The lines connecting them probably represent

axle An axle or axletree is a central shaft for a rotation, rotating wheel and axle, wheel or gear. On wheeled vehicles, the axle may be fixed to the wheels, rotating with them, or fixed to the vehicle, with the wheels rotating around the axle. In ...

s. The circle in the middle possibly symbolizes a container for

harvest Harvesting is the process of collecting plants, animals, or fish (as well as fungi) as food, especially the process of gathering mature crops, and "the harvest" also refers to the collected crops. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulses fo ...

. 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 A village is a human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Although villages are often located in rural areas, the term urban v ...

. The Bronocice pot inscription markings may represent a kind of "pre-writing" symbolic system that was suggested by

Marija Gimbutas Marija Gimbutas (, ; January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian archaeology, archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old European Culture, Old Europe" and for her Kurgan ...

in her model of Old European language, similar to Vinča culture logographics (5700–4500 BCE).

Historical implications

The image on the pot is one of the oldest well-dated representations of a four-wheeled vehicle in the world.Anthony (2007), p. 67. It suggests the existence of wagons in Central Europe as early as in the late 4th millennium BCE. They were presumably drawn by

aurochs The aurochs (''Bos primigenius''; or ; pl.: aurochs or aurochsen) is an extinct species of Bovini, bovine, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. With a shoulder height of up to in bulls and in cows, it was one of t ...

whose remains were found with the pot. Their horns were worn out as if tied with a rope, possibly a result of using a kind of

yoke A yoke is a wooden beam used between a pair of oxen or other animals to enable them to pull together on a load when working in pairs, as oxen usually do; some yokes are fitted to individual animals. There are several types of yoke, used in dif ...

. Based on the Bronocice discovery, several researchers (

Asko Parpola Asko Heikki Siegfried Parpola (born 12 July 1941, in Forssa) is a Finnish Indologist, current professor emeritus of Indology at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in the Indus Valley Civilization, specifically the study of the Indus scr ...

and Christian Carpelan), pointed out that "Indo-European languages possess inherited vocabulary related to wheeled transport", thus providing new research information about the origin of the Indo-European language family. They argue that "the wheeled vehicles were first invented around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE". In his review ''Theoretical Structural Archeology'', Geoff Carter writes: "The site was occupied during the Funnelbeaker or TRB culture phase, one of a complex group of cultures that succeeded the LBK in northern Europe, in the Fifth and Fourth Millennia BCE. Bones from the pit in which the pot was found gave radiocarbon dates of around 3635-3370 BCE". This makes it contemporaneous with the earliest depictions of wheeled

s found on

clay tablet In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian language, Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay t ...

pictographs A pictogram (also pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto) is a graphical symbol that conveys meaning through its visual resemblance to a physical object. Pictograms are used in systems of writing and visual communication. A pictography is a wri ...

at the Eanna district of

Uruk Uruk, the archeological site known today as Warka, was an ancient city in the Near East, located east of the current bed of the Euphrates River, on an ancient, now-dried channel of the river in Muthanna Governorate, Iraq. The site lies 93 kilo ...

, in the

Sumer Sumer () is the earliest known civilization, located in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age, early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. ...

ian civilization of

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

(modern Iraq), dated c. 3500–3350 BCE. Several historians argue that there was a diffusion of the wheeled vehicle from the

Near East The Near East () is a transcontinental region around the Eastern Mediterranean encompassing the historical Fertile Crescent, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and coastal areas of the Arabian Peninsula. The term was invented in the 20th ...

to Europe around the mid-4th millennium BCE. However, all of the earliest evidence for wheeled vehicles, including models, pictorial representations, wheels and vehicle remains, is in Europe, rather than in the Near East. According to Schier (2015), “The present evidence for early wheeled transport does not support the traditional belief in the oriental invention of wheel and wagon", and either wheeled vehicles were invented independently in Europe and Mesopotamia, or else the technology was transferred from Europe to Mesopotamia.

References

External links

Exhibition at the Archaeological Museum in Kraków. Photos and reconstruction (in Polish)
* ttp://www.bronocice.dzialoszyce.info/waza.htm Local website with photos (in Polish)br>Original inscription (in Polish)Popular science magazine article (in Polish)
{{Prehistoric technology, state=uncollapsed Archaeological artifacts 4th-millennium BC works Funnelbeaker culture Archaeological discoveries in Poland 1970s archaeological discoveries