Prestigious Lednica Piast Eagle Awards for the founders of the Academic Centre of Underwater Archaeology in Toruń

Abstract

In 2024, the Lednica Piast Eagle Award Chapter honoured Prof. Andrzej Kola and Dr. Gerard Wilke with commemorative statuettes (Fig. 1) in recognition of their contributions as founders and long-serving researchers of the early medieval Lednica bridges. The ceremony was held at the Museum of the First Piasts at Lednica and was attended by the Chapter’s members, local authorities of the Greater Poland voivodship, the Gniezno district and the municipality of Łubowo, as well as laureates from previous years, amongst them Prof. Hanna Maria Kóčka-Krenz, Prof. Andrzej Buko and Prof. Przemysław Urbańczyk.
The awarded two esteemed individuals are widely  recognised as the pioneering figures behind the establishment of the Underwater Archaeology Centre in Toruń, as well as the driving forces behind the development of the educational specialisation in this domain. During the years 1982 to 2008, they presided over the underwater research initiatives that culminated in the discovery and meticulous documentation of the wooden remnants of two early medieval bridges. These bridges, once integral to the transportation networks leading to Gniezno and Poznań, have now been preserved and studied by the efforts of the present-day laureates. The underwater exploration has yielded a vast array of cultural material, including iron military equipment, bronze bowls, wooden, bone and leather artefacts, and numerous ceramic vessels. The results of these explorations and their findings were presented at various national and international conferences and published in numerous
articles and scholarly books (Figs. 2–4).