b> TVP WEEKLY: Bukowa Góra in Dąbrowa Górnicza is one of Poland's newest, potentially most extensive and popular archaeological sites, because it is full of surprises. Artefacts from 11,000 years ago appear there! And the discovery of this site is largely due to you.

DARIUSZ ROZMUS: There has already been a trip from near Koszalin to Bukowa Góra to see these excavations of ours. Also indeed the subject is slowly becoming popular, and we hope to continue and expand our work.

There is no shortage of megalithomaniacs, and archaeologists have uncovered, among other things, gigantic megaliths at this site that were certainly man-made. What exactly are megaliths and how do we know that a boulder was worked by a human hand?

Megaliths are understood in two ways. A very broad definition (not necessarily accepted in the archaeological community) encompasses all sorts of stone constructions and structures, from the Egyptian pyramids and temples, to Zimbabwe in the African country of the same name, to Stonehenge or Carnac. There is also a second, more scientific definition, which includes huge stone tombs or tombs covered with stones, also chamber tombs, Stonehenge-type structures, menhirs, i.e. vertical standing pillars and dolmens, i.e. huge boulders supported on something. In Poland, we have monuments of this type in Wietrzychowice and Sarnów, the so-called Kujawy tombs. Megalithic constructions are associated with the Funnel Cultures, the Amphoras, and even earlier. It is debatable when the idea of creating megaliths began to appear. It is said to be between the fifth and sixth millennium BC, but this dating is now beginning to shift....

Well, I'm thinking! Stone steles are undoubtedly 12,000 years old. And these are megaliths, even by the narrowest scientific definitions.

More and more such monuments will be discovered. It is worth looking for them, especially in the Balkans. People learn from school that Egypt and Mesopotamia were the birthplace of civilisation, but archaeologists today know very well that this is not the case. It should also be said that we are dealing with a variant called megaxillions, where giant tree trunks were used instead of rock blocks. Of course, these have generally not survived to the present day, but archaeologists are able to discover their existence because postholes have been left behind. And this can be seen in the excavations.

At the same time, I have to admit that I am not an expert on megaliths. I just happen to be here. However, there are more than just megaliths on Bukowa Góra; there are also things there that I have been working on for more than 30 years, such as traces of ore mining and metallurgy and its significance for the building of Polish statehood.

I wonder about the origin of this place. I understand that in what is now the Zagłębie Dąbrowskie region there is a flat terrain and around it several hills - the Trzebiesławice Hills, of which Bukowa is the highest. And these ancient people, wanting to be closer to Heaven, to pray and make offerings, go to this mountain and put some big stones there. So is Bukowa Góra and the traces found on it a surprise?

What is surprising is not that these artefacts are there, but that no one has noticed it before and started investigating. Already a dozen years ago, when I was in charge of the Archaeological Picture of Poland team, we recognised Bukowa Góra as an archaeological site. Yet everything we recorded there was so unusual and puzzling that we were afraid to draw too far-reaching conclusions without deeper research. Because things like dolmens have not really been discovered in our country so far. That is why, when making an archaeological site there, we concentrated on the obvious, i.e. on the remains of medieval mining and metallurgy.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE I decided to place the centre of the site at the top of Bukowa Góra, which is where we are now exposing decayed leaves. Which may help to tell as fully as possible the prehistory of the lands where Poland is today. Those "impassable forests and deep marshes, where only the wild beast roared" which persist in our minds, I even commented in my habilitation thesis that we must, however, supplement this description with those stinking lead smelting furnaces. For around Bukowa Góra we have so-called warpies, or mining pits, from the medieval and modern periods, and we now know that also from the early Middle Ages, preceding Polish statehood - we find evidence of this in the form of lead weights. Technical culture is unfortunately underestimated. And it was developed, for example, in the Bull of Gniezno in 1136 it is written about silver diggers near Bytom, in the village of Zwersow, which we still cannot precisely locate. This connects to Bukowa Góra and allows us to move on to what beyond the megaliths is there.

Then why did no one notice this before? Was there a lack of technology?

Today, so-called LIDAR archaeology is making waves. Thanks to space technologies, we can observe what is on Earth that often cannot be seen from an observer's position near the ground. This is a very interesting period in the history of archaeology and there are a lot of new discoveries. However, you still need a shovel if you want to confirm these LIDAR discoveries. We, thanks to scientists from the Wrocław University of Technology, have access to such a better area than the generally available LIDAR, the area we are interested in. And there we see the huge pits and warps I mentioned. In addition, we see a huge barrow burial ground all over the peak.

These barrows vary in form, they are oblong and round, sometimes topped with stelae, covered with stones, sometimes very large. Nowadays it is not difficult to see them - I invite everyone to Bukowa Góra, we have opened a path for tourists - and everyone can walk among these barrows and see for themselves. It's best in August or September, when the new leaves haven't yet fallen and the old ones have definitely decayed - by the way, we're just uncovering this mulch as part of an excavation, over a fairly extensive area.

Is this burial ground from the same period as the pits?

We are just starting these excavations and there is still a great deal we don't know. This is a dozen hectares of land, or more! I believe that the barrows - at least in part - are older, at least from the early medieval, pre-state period, predating Christianisation. Because in the 11th or 12th century barrow cemeteries, especially of this scale, were no longer being built. The variety of shapes may also suggest that the barrows are from different periods.

Some of them are quite ordinary - just like in descriptions of early medieval barrows. Who else would be buried in them but the ancestors of those miners, metallurgists, who set about mining and smelting lead and extracting silver here as early as the 11th or 12th century? Few realise that galena, i.e. lead sulphide mixed with silver sulphide, is most often mined. Both metals are extracted by smelting from a single deposit. We also have lead monuments from here, from the 9th century, from the ore-bearing area covering Olkusz, Bytom, Tarnowskie Góry, Siewierz, Chrzanów, Jaworzno and Dąbrowa Górnicza. We have only had smelting furnaces since the 11th century, although there are probably still older, undiscovered furnaces somewhere. So we have people who knew what stone to take out of the ground and how to smelt and separate the two precious metals.

We opened up one of the barrows. We found burnt bones, charcoals, so we have dates from the 9th to the 11th century. Unfortunately there was no pottery, but this is somehow not unusual. In most medieval barrows there is nothing, sometimes just a layer of ash. Will there be no monuments at all? I don't think so. We have opened one grave so far, and there are more available. Hundreds of them.

I find the barrows topped with stelae particularly interesting. Many of them are even topped with an additional - truly unusual - pyramid carved out of stone. In the broadest sense, these are also megalithic constructions. Sometimes there are two or three steles, sometimes even four. The tallest ones were visible from the surface. Giant blocks of rock are also present, but made of a completely different stone and worked differently from that used for the stele or barrow cladding. These giants also include the two typical dolmens we have discovered so far, such as those found in western Europe. We hope that if we clean and dig deeper, we will find more of them and their remains.

Let me make sure: so Bukowa Góra itself is a natural hill? Because it varies, it looks like a mountain and turns out to be a settlement, buried for 8,000 years in the sand of history. And on this Bukowa there are, covered by decayed beech, absolutely anthropogenic stone and earth structures that are certainly more than a thousand years old, but we don't know exactly how many?

Bukowa Góra is made of crushed-bearing dolomite, while the structures - both steles and megaliths - are made of diploporous dolomite. Where did these rocks come from? Well, we don't have a situation here like at Stonehenge, where some of the blocks were brought over 200 km all the way from Wales. At Bukowa Góra it is a distance of a few hundred metres to a few kilometres.

The erosion processes at the top of the hill mean that the soil there is very shallow. The steles are dug in and wherever we did a probe, you can see it. It's the same with those big stone blocks - no doubt they were dug in. It looks like a foundation trench - a pit was dug and they were set. So you can see the disturbance in the layering of the soil around them. Sometimes the excavation is very sophisticated, e.g. a three-stage excavation with a serration, as if someone had made a staircase in order to fix the giant stone later. This shape of the excavation, as well as the sand brought there to the top and the wooden pillars, of which traces have been left, probably indicate the building process and the stabilisation of the blocks during their deposition. These largest megaliths are completely incompatible with the early medieval image.

How much do these largest megaliths, already exposed at least partially, weigh?

This would have to be counted on the basis of the density of the specific rock, but they are a dozen tonnes for sure. And one of the biggest mysteries on Bukowa Góra is the sand. Huge amounts of sand that should not be there at all. It is as if it is trapped, perhaps between some structures. Normally, even if it was carried to bedding and fixing of these stelae, it should have been removed by the wind and rain long time ago.

However, there are flint cores, certainly worked by human hand, from the late Palaeolithic, strewn around Bukowa Góra. They are some 11,000 years old. We are not yet in a position to prove the connection between these flints under the mountain and the structures above, but they were found in the first ploughed field you reach when descending from Bukowa Góra.

That is to say, we have a late Palaeolithic settlement, then - I will insist - a megalithic phase, then we don't know what, and then we have a barrow burial ground, which is at least early medieval and was constructed many years, perhaps more than a hundred or even longer, since these barrows are so different. In other words, people have been roaming Bukowa Góra for 11,000 years. Of course, it is not possible to suggest any direct link between these people ending up in the area in successive centuries over the millennia.

And although we designated this position a dozen years ago, with the resources we have in the City Museum "Sztygarka" I wouldn't move it all....

But…

But people who are interested in ancient astronomy came along. It was they who noticed that most of these stelae were precisely oriented. It was also possible to note some effects of sunlight on these stelae during solstices. One of them, Mr Maciej Rodziewicz, approached me and persuaded me to return to Bukowa Góra, although there was no other need for a intensive exploration of the site, as no one had destroyed anything there. Which is usually a reason to rush, because "there's about to be a road here, or an airport, or a housing estate". We went and started looking at the alignment of these rock blocks together with a compass. I found that it was necessary to do probing near two massive stelae to know for sure that these were not some 'post-mining remains'. Earlier preliminary geophysical surveys had indicated that there were some hearths and ditches there.

These initial excavations from the first season of work now had to be widened, cleaned. For the peace of mind of my conscience, I did nine probes to be sure that the subsequent steles (chosen at random or at the request of the geologists working with us) were also set up by people, that this was no natural phenomenon. This is where cooperation with geologists is invaluable. Also the subsequent geophysical work presented at the conference in December 2022 at the "Sztygarka" Museum showed that there are ditches, hearths, barrows.

Recently, LIDAR and archaeoastronomy have yielded important discoveries, including the decipherment of the meaning of dots and dashes on cave paintings as a universal lunar calendar from well over 30,000 years ago. A new giant Mesoamerican calendar was also discovered, not from 300 BC. (as the previously found 260-day calendar was dated), but 800 years older. Such research is also needed on Bukowa Góra.

So let us return to this orientation of the stelae. Today, with the help of a compass, we can see that some of them are oriented perfectly to the north, while others are oriented perfectly on the east-west axis. Here I am counting on the cooperation of people who have already spent several days with us on the excavations, namely Prof. Mariusz Ziółkowski from the University of Warsaw, a specialist in archaeoastronomy in pre-Columbian America, and Prof. Jacek Kościuk from the Institute of the History of Architecture at Wrocław University of Technology - they are known for their Andean expedition to Machu Picchu. Of course, there is still a great deal of excavation work ahead of us to visualise and catalogue all of this. In turn, Dr Andrzej Tyc from the University of Silesia took samples of this sand from under the megaliths for a thermoluminescence study. This is because it is possible to determine when this sand "saw the Sun" for the last time. Also Professor Maciej Pawlikowski from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow and Professor Jerzy Cabała from the University of Silesia are working on the geology and mineralogy of Bukowa Góra.

Is Bukowa Góra, this whole region of Zagłębie, the former Duchy of Siewierz, on the map of pre-medieval Polish archaeology a kind of white spot? It's hard to be a pioneer in archaeology....

We have the Lusatian culture, where lead artefacts from the Halstadt period (Iron Age) come from our region. Our early medieval, early Polish silver and lead smelting basin has entered Polish science permanently, because it has its consequences. What did the state of the first Piasts live off of? I am of the opinion that at some point the scale of the slave trade diminished, especially as it was not without reason that St Adalbert was recorded on the Gniezno Gate as forbidding this trade. It was necessary to travel further and further for pagans (because Christians could not be sold). And here we have the first Piasts building up power and fighting for influence in this part of the world with the German Reich. And as Napoleon noted, to wage war, you need three things: money, money and more money.

In the so-called silver treasures discovered by Scandinavian or Polish archaeologists we have, up to a certain point, silver of oriental origin, from central Asia. Its influx ceases, but the crisis does not follow, as European smelting centres start up. The Harz Mountains, the Vosges, and here in Poland. In the Czech Republic, on the other hand, it started later. That is why the Polish-Czech struggle for the south of Poland was so important, because they needed this ore.

If we want to know what went before, we have to go deeper. Although now we want to first expose as much area as possible from the litter - we have managed to clear a dozen acres in this way to date. This exposes the stone structures and we start to notice objects. They are strange, so you have to proceed carefully. The excavations - where we went under the bedding level - are only 25 square metres as of today, which is very little. The research team for these excavations is building up, its main core has been established. If we have the resources....

And who pays for it?

For the time being, we are only using the funds of the "Sztygarka" Museum, which we have thanks to the city of Dąbrowa Górnicza. We have not yet applied for state funds. But more and more ordinary people and scientists are coming to us and want to cooperate, because you can see the gigantic potential of this place. For an archaeologist, this is a delight, because here everyone can find what they like best. There's the Stone Age, megaliths and a gigantic barrow burial ground... There was a similarly large, maybe larger one in Krzemionki in Kraków. But everything there was destroyed by the 19th century construction of Austrian forts, that is before the archaeologists came. Perhaps there were more of these things and they weren't destroyed at all in the medieval or modern period, because pagan or not, people respected graves. Most of these kinds of monuments, including megaliths, such as those in Kujawy, were destroyed at the turn of the 20th century. There was nothing sacred for people anymore, one could say. Therefore, Bukowa Góra, as a place not devastated and not so deeply transformed in the modern and contemporary periods, may be an opportunity for us.

– Magdalena Kawalec-Segond
-translated by Tomasz Krzyżanowski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

Dariusz Rozmus, Ph.D., is an archaeologist who has worked on excavations in Poland and Austria for nearly 40 years. His main research interests are in the Stone Age and early Middle Ages, including numismatics, oriental sources, historic preservation and the history and philosophy of law. As part of his passion, in addition to archaeology he is involved in the inventory of Jewish cemeteries and the publication of their monographs. He documents non-professional cemetery art, not only Jewish. He is the author, co-author and editor of more than a hundred scientific articles and 32 book publications. He currently works at the "Sztygarka" City Museum in Dąbrowa Górnicza and at the Humanitas University in Sosnowiec. Since childhood, his passions have also included sailing, aquaristics, mountains and caves.