Part of a hoard of amber consisting of 95 beads, two intermediate products and three lumps of raw material. It is estimated that originally it could have included several hundred (200-300) kilograms of raw material and around 7,000 beads.
The deposit consisted of finished beads and intermediate products as well as worked lumps: started product forms and lumps of raw amber. The beads were shaped on a lathe. Traces of turning are visible on their weathered surface. Some of the beads are decorated with round grooves. Considering shape of the beads, five types can be identified. The largest group is of a convex disc type (type II), also known as Basonia type. The objects do not have any signs of use which might indicate that they were deposited shortly after they had been made.
The raw material from Basonia was identified as Baltic amber – succinite. It could be a subject of a merchant transaction which took place in the West Balt territory.
Presumably the hoard could have been hidden near modern-day village of Bosonia. The amber objects were found in 1914 when forming earthworks for the Austro-Hungarian armies during World War I. The people who had come across the hoard mistook amber for resin and as a result large part of the hoard was lost. The rest of the deposit was bought by J. Sawa, a pharmacist from Urzędów, as rosin for soap. The first information on the find was published only 23 years later by Michał Pękalski, a regionalist and a lover of ethnography and archaeology. Thanks to him, some of the amber objects were passed before World War II to the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw. After the war, J. Sawa donated another objects to the Regional Museum in Radom and the Archaeology of Poland Department of Maria Curie Skłodowska University. The rest of the collection was distributed by the pharmacist’s family between the Earth Museum in Warsaw and the Lubelskie Voivodeship Conservator of Archaeological Monuments who passed them to the Lublin Museum. Currently the Lublin Museum houses the largest surviving part of the hoard consisting of 253 amber beads, 11 lumps of raw material and about a dozen fragments of beads.
Chronology:
the first half of the 5th century AD
Museum collection:
the Lublin Museum
by M. Stasiak-Cyran
