Poznań March 2011

I got off the plane in Poznań this morning to be greeted by snowflakes gently drifting down from the sky. Apparently the snow was thick on the ground around Malbork castle yesterday...it's a good thing we're not doing any excavation or coring this time around! Instead I'm zipping around north Poland checking out sites and sorting out logistics for the summer excavations. From Poznań, where I'm staying with the Makowieckis (and where I've eaten my first sturgeon - the whole thing, smoked):

 
...we go to Toruń tomorrow, around a few castles in the Kulmerland, then to Malbork, Elbląg, Olsztyn, sites in the Masurian Lakelands, Warsaw, Gdańsk and back to London. Already a lot of material has been gathered, and there's a good chance we'll be able to identify technological differences in the mass processing of animals between the early medieval and crusader periods, and between the towns and castles of the Teutonic Order at a bunch of sites along the Lower Vistula. En route I'm picking up material for isotopic studies. Of all the weird things I've seen today, what people were doing to horse heads in early medieval Gdańsk is the strangest...more on this another time. I'll finish with a snapshot of one of the birthplaces of Polish Christianity in the 10th century - part of a baptismal font uncovered underneath the gothic archcathedral in Pozńan. Not the greatest photo, but it'll do...