Early medieval burial from the culmination of the Old Town Hill in Sandomierz

Abstract

The subject of this article is a grave dated to the end of the 10th c. AD discovered in 2016 at the culmination of the so-called Old Town Hill in Sandomierz. The grave, just like a burial found in 2006 – located a dozen or so metres from the discussed feature – was unusually oriented – approximately along the N-S axis. Specialist analyses and examination of the burial goods found in the grave – a knife, a firesteel, a flint strike-a-light and a vessel fragment – indicate that the buried man probably lived in Sandomierz or its surroundings. The graves discovered in 2006 and 2016 are not part of a vast cemetery that occupied the middle and upper part of the Old Town Hill in the 11th c., but they are separate burials. It is possible that they attest to an abandoned attempt to establish a cemetery by an unspecified group inhabiting Sandomierz at the end of the 11th c., desiring to stress their distinctiveness from the rest of the population not only by having their own necropolis, but also by digging graves that were oriented in a different direction.