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    STUDIA GEOLOGIA - Issue no. Special Issue / 2009  
         
  Article:   METABASITES - THE KEY RAW MATERIAL FOR NEOLITHIC SHOE-LAST CELTS AND AXES IN CENTRAL EUROPE.

Authors:  ANTONÍN PŘICHYSTAL. 		 
       
         
  Abstract:  For roughly thirty years it has been known that the prevailing rocks utilized by the earliest Neolithic farmers in Central Europe for their polished artefacts (shoe-last axes, adzes, flat axes) were metabasites described especially as actinolite–hornblende greenschists or actinolite greenschists (Štelcl and Malina 1970). Gradually it was found that this rock type largely dominates at Neolithic settlements related to cultures with the Linear and Stroke-ornamented Pottery and the older phase of the Moravian Painted Ware culture (Lengyel cultural complex) in Bohemia and Moravia. The importance of the metabasites as raw material was emphasised when Schwarz-Mackensen and Schneider (1983) referred to the fact that actinolite–hornblende greenschists represent 90% of several hundred Early Neolithic artefacts in the northern foothills of the Harz Mts. in Germany. From this knowledge we can conclude that this type is the prevalent raw material in a large part of Central Europe, i.e. in the territory of Germany (e.g. Ramminger, 2007; Christensen et al., 2008), Bohemia, Moravia, northern Austria, southern Poland and northern Hungary.

Key words: neolithic, Central Europe, shoe-last celts and axes, raw materials
  
         
     
         
         
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