Early farming adaptation in the Wiśnicz Foothills in the Carpathians. Settlements at Łoniowa and Żerków

Excavations conducted in 2003 - 2006 at the early Neolithic settlement Łoniowa 80, led to the unveiling of the relics of a long post house connected with Linear Pottery Culture (Želiezovcé phase). Inside, two pits with a contour similar to the rectangular were discovered in the stratigraphic relationship with traces of the house construction. On this basis, we can be sure that both pits were created during the construction or re-construction of the house. At least one of the pits (no. 23), due to the set of artefacts (goblet of a "delicate work", a 12-element flint deposit, two trapezes of Jurassic Cracovian flint), can be considered a grave. In addition, the features of the Malice culture were also discovered; they belong to its classical phase. The second settlement at Żerków provided also materials dated at the Želiezovcé phase of the Linear Pottery Culture. A part of the post longhouse was also unearthed here. The peculiarity of the ceramic from Żerków is the ornament of notch, consisting of three to five holes. This type of ornament has not been detected at Łoniowa house. Both these sites, as well as several neighboring ones, are located in the highest zone of the landscape – on the culmination of hilly ranges. This is a deviation from the typical locating of Linear Pottery Culture sites almost exclusively in the lower parts of slopes and terraces. It can be assumed that the villages developing on the culmination of the Wiśnicz Foothills formed the local settlement network. Extremely small territorial distance between settlements under discussion (ca. 1 km) is probably the result of the fragmentation of the foothills surface. In such an approach they can be treated as one big village consisting of several hamlets. Taking into account the high raw-material potential and the high level of flint technology represented by discovered flint assemblages, we can assume that the settlement was an important point in the route along the Dunajec and Poprad rivers