Legacy and Memory: An Overview of the Biskupin Archaeological Site in Central Poland and its Role in the Polish Identity

By Blake Wilson

The Biskupin archaeological site in Poland is tied to the Lusatian peoples found in Central and Eastern Europe from around the 1250s BCE. Famous for their fine jewelry and other burial goods such as deformed blades, the Lusatians are a member of the broader Pan-European Urnfield cultures known for the cremation of their dead and then burying the urns in the hundreds in large open fields. Biskupin itself was rediscovered almost hundred years ago and almost immediately became the center of political discourse. At the time of Biskupin’s discovery, Poland’s Second Republic had only existed for around 15 years having been formed from an amalgam of lands from the former Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires, which had collapsed after the end of the First World War. In this atmosphere of heightened geopolitical tensions, the historical and archaeological significance of this site were eclipsed in favor of pushing a political narrative. Today, following the wars and border shifts of the 20^th century, the treatment of the Bronze Age settlement of Biskupin has changed dramatically. No longer interpreted through the prism of existential threats from the outside, today, the site serves as a place for education for many people about people living in the late Bronze Age and archeology itself.

Biskupin garnered significant attention after its discovery in the early 1930s when preserved pieces of wood from the settlement were discovered by workers on a new infrastructure project in the area. These workers sent a call to Professor and Archaeologist Józef Kostrzewski with the university in nearby Poznan, who would begin to conduct excavations that helped date the site to the end of the second millennium BCE. For Poland, which was 15 years into its independence after 123 years of disappearance on Europe’s maps, the Biskupin site served as evidence of Slavic settlements in this part of Europe since the Late Bronze Age. The discovery of Biskupin helped legitimize Poland as a European nation by proving that Poles were not “strangers” but rather some of the original inhabitants of these lands. Poles flocked to this site in droves; it was given the nickname of “Polish Pompeii”, furthering the claims of Poland’s historical connections in the region.

The timing of the discovery coincided with the rise of Nazi Germany and increasingly tense relations between Poland and its western neighbor. These tensions led Poles to experience an existential threat to their own survival, and the government began to use anything and everything to prove the historical claims of the Polish people to the lands within Poland’s interwar borders, even a site dating back three thousand years. However, these public information campaigns did little to prevent the start of the Second World War and a new partition of Poland.

After the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis shifted the meaning of the Biskupin site from one that provided evidence for Slavic roots in Central Europe to a site that would serve Nazi racial ideologies about the history of the Germanic peoples in the region. The Nazi government claimed that the site was Germanic in origin rather than Slavic and thus should belong to the Germans. The Biskupin site became one more justification by the Germans for the occupation of Poland in 1939. The invasion was not aggression or conquest, according to the Nazis, but just the return of Germanic lands to Germans^[1]. Due to his denial of the site having Germanic origins, Professor Kostrzewski was wanted for arrest by the Gestapo and was forced to go into hiding, eventually fleeing Poland for safety abroad. Unsurprisingly, the archaeological evidence did not support the German theories, and in 1943 when they realized they could no longer support the narrative. The frustrated Germans destroyed the excavated structures and buried the site in sand and earth.

Following the end of World War II, the site was once again within Poland’s borders. The ideological shift under Soviet domination meant that the former conflicting theories between the Poles and the Germans diminished. Slowly, the site shifted towards an archeological research site and an educational project. This change was facilitated by the absence of the existential threats of the 1930s such as German expansion. For some time the site sat abandoned, half submerged in the Biskupin swamps from where it was found. Sadly during the Soviet years Poland had to flood two thirds of Biskupin and eventually most of the site was covered to avoid deterioration^[2]. Post-1989, following the collapse of communism, Poland has emerged as a much more active player on the European and global scale. The country’s impressive development led to its joining the European Union in 2004 and has since become one of the top beneficiaries of the EU funds used to modernize itself. In this opening climate of opening, Biskupin no longer needs to serve as a tool in the country’s battle for legitimization on the continent.

From the earliest excavations, Biskupin was the center of revolutions in archaeology due to the uniqueness of the site itself. The preserved wood meant that archaeologists had biological links to the fort and scientists could use dendrochronological methods, dating a tree by its rings, to determine the fort was over three thousand years old. This preservation of the site and depth of research allowed the scientists and archaeologists to create a remarkably accurate and complete reconstruction of the site with walls, huts, and pathways. The transition into an open air museum has turned this site into a popular tourist attraction for thousands of people every year and adjacent to the reconstructed village, a modern exhibition pavilion displays a wide array of artifacts recovered from the waterlogged remains of the original site. These objects include everyday tools such as fishhooks, axe heads, and woodworking implements as well as the distinctive Lusatian jewelry that has become emblematic of the culture. During the tourism heavy months many reenactors walk the site in period appropriate attire and as the temperature drops and tourism declines archaeologists shift their attention to the artifacts themselves and prepare many exhibitions of both reconstructed and original artifacts for the tourists.

After its discovery in the early 1930s Biskupin became a source of great debate and controversy but over the last century it has been turned into a modern form of education for many people. The development of the site shows the impact of the practice of archaeology as a tool for better understanding of our collective past and ourselves. It shows how archaeology can serve governments to legitimize their authority, regardless of the archeological record. In the case of Biskupin, the settlement was, in the end, not Slavic or Germanic but something much older that would eventually evolve into the later cultures that inhabited these lands that we see today.

^[1] Piotrowska, D. (1997). Biskupin 1933-1996: Archaeology, Politics and Nationalism.

^[2] Kępa, M. (2021, July 7). Biskupin: The Polish pompeii | article | culture.pl. Culture.Pl. https://culture.pl/en/article/biskupin-the-polish-pompeii