Bronocice pot facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Bronocice pot |
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| Created | c. 3500 BC |
| Discovered | c. 1975 Bronocice, Świętokrzyskie, Poland |
| Present location | Kraków, Lesser Poland, Poland |
The Bronocice pot (in Polish: Waza z Bronocic) is a special ceramic vase. It has one of the oldest known pictures of a wheeled vehicle. This ancient pot was found in a village called Bronocice in Poland.
Scientists believe it belongs to an ancient group of people called the Funnelbeaker culture. Using radiocarbon dating, they found out the pot is from around 3500 BCE. Today, you can see this amazing pot at the Archaeological Museum of Kraków in southern Poland.
Discovering the Ancient Pot
The Bronocice pot was found between 1974 and 1976. Archaeologists were digging up a large Neolithic (Stone Age) village in Bronocice. This village is about 50 kilometers northeast of Kraków.
Teams from the Polish Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York worked on the dig. One of the archaeologists, Sarunas Milisauskas, shared how exciting the discovery was. He said they found the pot with the wagon picture in a pit. An animal bone found with it helped date it to about 3400 BCE. This was one of the first signs of wheeled wagons in Europe.
What the Pot's Pictures Mean
The pictures on the Bronocice pot show important parts of life long ago. The most interesting part is five simple drawings that look like wagons. Each drawing shows a vehicle with a pole for an animal to pull it. It also has four wheels. The lines connecting the wheels probably show the axles.
The circle in the middle might be a container for harvested crops. Other pictures on the pot include a tree and a river. There are also shapes that could be fields with roads or ditches. Some think it might even show the layout of a village.
These markings might be a very early form of "pre-writing." Some experts, like Marija Gimbutas, thought they were part of a symbolic system. It could be similar to the ancient symbols used by the Vinča culture.
Why This Pot is So Important
The picture on the Bronocice pot is one of the oldest clear images of a four-wheeled vehicle in the world. It shows that wagons were used in Central Europe as early as 3500 BCE. These wagons were likely pulled by aurochs, which are ancient wild cattle. Scientists found aurochs bones with the pot. Their horns looked worn, as if they had been tied with a rope for a yoke.
This discovery helps us understand the history of Indo-European languages. Some researchers, like Asko Parpola, believe that words for wheeled transport came from these early times. They think wheeled vehicles were invented around the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.
The Bronocice pot shows that wheeled vehicles existed in Europe at the same time as in Mesopotamia. For a long time, people thought the wheel was invented only in the Near East. But the evidence from Bronocice and other European sites suggests that wheeled vehicles might have been invented in Europe too. Or, the idea could have spread from Europe to Mesopotamia.
