Bronocice pot

The Bronocice pot, discovered in a village in Gmina Dzialoszyce, Swietokrzyskie Voivodeship, near Nidzica River, Poland, is a ceramic vase incised with the earliest known image of what may be a wheeled vehicle. It was dated by the radiocarbon method to 3635–3370 BC, or 3470-3210 BC, and is attributed to the Funnelbeaker archaeological culture. Today it is housed in the Archaeological Museum of Kraków (Muzeum Archeologiczne w Krakowie), Poland.

The pot was discovered in 1974-76 during the archaeological excavation of a large Neolithic settlement in Bronocice by the Nidzica River, ca. 50 km to north east of Kraków. The excavations were carried out between 1974 and 1980 by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York at Buffalo (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 Funnel Beaker vessel in a pit. An animal bone associated with the pot in the pit was dated by radiocarbon method, around 3400 BC (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 Neolithic Bronocice findings to the Lublin-Volhynian culture (between 3100-2200 BC), "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 Little Poland."

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