On the metal part of the belt with ox head from Burkat near Działdowo

Abstract

A small number of ancient devotional objects come from the area of the Oder and Vistula river basins. One of them has so far been considered to be a bronze pendant with a carefully modeled ox head discovered loosely in Burkat near Działdowo, back in the interwar period. More recently, an analogous object was found in a topsoil in Solec Kujawski. A specialized examination using X-ray Fluorescence Analysis (XRF) showed that it was made of a brass alloy with modern characteristics. It prompted a further search for both pendants patterns in a not so distant cultural reality and brought attention to very similar

and sometimes even analogous metal elements of contemporary butchers’ belts, often decorated with the bull’s head motif, an important guild symbol.

The article also discusses the issue of other ancient devotional objects found in the area of European Barbaricum, which mainly includes bronze figurines with representations of Roman deities. First of all, attention was paid to the varied mechanism of their adapta- tion among the northern barbarians, from treating them as recycling metal used in local metallurgical production to the custom, readable in the Pomerania on the Oder River, of depositing figurines as votive offerings in aquatic environment.