Krakow, Poland

Tom Higham and Natasha Reynolds were in Poland in the city of Krakow this past week examining material from several sites and meeting with colleagues. Prof. Janusz Kozlowski hosted and organised our visit.

The region north of the Carpathian Mountains is very important for our undestanding of human settlement dynamics during MOIS3. There are several key sites in southern Poland that are of interest to the PalaeoChron project and our aims of exploring the spatio-temporal distribution of archaeological industries spanning the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. Some of these are currently under excavation, or have been excavated recently, which is a great advantage of course. Amongst the key archaeological industries we are interested in are the Micoquian, the Blade Mousterian, the Jerzmanowician, the Szeletian and the early Upper Palaeolithic.

We had several very productive meetings with Janusz, Damien Stefanski, Jaroslaw Wilczynski, Piotr Pojtal, Krystof Sobczyk, and Magda and Maciej Krajcarz. We took several excellent samples for dating from several sites including Piekary II. We aim to be back in Poland in the summer for sampling of archaeological material with hopefully good results too come in the latter part of 2016.