Ostravské muzeum

PREHISTORY

Neolithic and Eneolithic

Humans have adapted to gradual changes in the natural environment by changing the way they get their food. They began to specialise in growing field crops and keeping livestock. This brought with it longer-term settlement in one place and the building of settlements. To store food more conveniently and to process it further, people began firing clay pots. Clothing made from skins and furs was replaced by clothing made from sheep's wool and flax. Trees were cut down more extensively for house construction, but there was also clearing of forests for land gain, and perhaps related to this rough work was the production of sharpened and double-sided axes, wedges and other tools.

In the Eneolithic, knowledge of the secrets of copper and non-ferrous metal processing in general spread to Central Europe. People mainly made clothing accessories and weapons out of them. There was also a change in the way the land was cultivated, with the old method being replaced by ox-drawn plough farming. People also used the power of animals to pull four-wheeled wagons, which was apparently unknown until then.

In the Ostrava region, people of the Early and Late Stone Age left us only a modest number of objects. The question of the foundation of the settlement at Landek (perhaps around 4000 BC?) remains. Hammer-axes, axes and wedges are relatively common finds in the Ostrava region. A stone hammer-axe was found in Ostrava-Hrabová, and a serpentine axe was discovered between Vítkovice and Ostrava in 1918.

In Ostrava-Zábřeh, a primary school pupil found a stone wedge with a drilled hole.

Bronze age and Hallstatt culture

With the beginning of the Bronze Age (2200/1900 BC), people began to discover the benefits of bronze, a copper and tin alloy. This golden metal is both harder than copper and flexible. Items made from it gradually became dominant and probably became a measure of wealth and status for individuals or families. Perhaps due to the journeys of traders, exchange and thus work specialization developed, perhaps most significantly in the extraction of metals and the manufacture of objects from them. Bronze Age society thus began to stratify more clearly into people of wealth and power and people of poverty. This is evidenced by the rich burials of prominent individuals, the 'priest-kings', under the mounds in the younger period. Metal resources seem to have gradually become depleted and this signalled a further development into the Iron Age, when bronze objects were gradually replaced by iron ones.

In the Ostrava region, findings from this period are limited. From the Younger Bronze Age (around 1000 BC) comes a bronze sword dredged from the gravels of the old Odra riverbed near Koblov. In the Hallstatt period, there was a small agricultural settlement of people of the Lusatian culture at Landek.