Abstract During the Early Iron Age (750–450 BC), settlement centres emerged in western Poland, playing a significant socio-economic role in local development. The fortified settlement of Wicina (Żary County, Lubusz Voivodeship) in western Poland, is an exemplar of such a regional center, strategically positioned on a natural dune above a marshland. In this study, we use archaeometallurgical analyses to shed light on the role of this settlement in the supra-regional metal exchange network. We compare the results with artifacts likely from the Wicina settlement found in the nearby Bieszków hoard. The results of isotopic analyses indicate that the copper in the artifacts selected for study (n=15) originated from multiple sources. The majority of the metal came from the Mediterranean region – Sardinia, the southwestern Iberian Peninsula, and Cyprus. A single sample comes from Alpine or Slovak copper ore deposits. A large fragment of pure copper appears to have come from local deposits in the Holy Cross Mountains in southern Poland. This is the first result indicating that copper may have been mined locally in Poland during the Early Iron Age. Our hypothesis is that copper reached western Poland along established trade routes (including the so-called Amber Route) and was then distributed further. A small portion of the total copper used in the workshops in Wicina was supplemented by local copper mining in the Holy Cross Mountains. Control of a portion of the trade route, involvement in long-distance trade, access to goods, and its possible redistribution influenced the settlement’s development.
Nowak et al. (Sat,) studied this question.