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On display: March-June 2023
Exhibition curator: Marcin Ławniczak
The exhibition in the series "Close encounters with..." is dedicated to local legends in confrontation with archaeology.
Local historical memory is an integral part of social identity. However, as shown by archaeological research, it can often be misleading. It is common for historical monuments to be significantly older than local folk tales assert. For instance, many early medieval and earlier fortified settlements in Poland are interpreted by locals as "Swedish trenches", while in Ukraine, ancient barrows are referred to as "Cossack graves". That is because "folk memory` goes back only as far as around the turn of the late medieval and early modern periods. Hence, many considerably older traces of human existence are fitted into later historical events.
Such a situation also occurred in south-eastern Wielkopolska in the village of Skalmierzyce. A legend states that a church, a cemetery and a village were located in the surrounding fields in old times. Recent archaeological research has revealed traces of settlement in this area, but instead of medieval or modern remains of occupation, it yielded much earlier, prehistoric finds...
