TREASURES EXTRACTED FROM THE EARTH. UPPER SILESIA AND THE BORDERLAND. Ed. by Eugeniusz Tomczak, Wyd. Slaskie

The album 'Skarby ziemi wydarte. Gorny Slask i pogranicze' (Treasures Extracted from the Earth. Upper Silesia and the Borderland), was published in 2005 by the Silesian Centre of Cultural Heritage in Katowice. It is the outcome of editorial cooperation supervised by Eugeniusz Tomczak and involving scientific institutes, museums, cultural institutions, and the collector Roman Czarnecki. A presentation of archaeological monuments and objects discovered in the present-day voivodeships of Silesia and Opole. The well-devised and logical arrangement. of the book starts with an Introduction by Jerzy Piekalski, in four versions: Polish, English, German and Czech, with the author discussing the fundamental concepts and most essential issues of archaeology. He also outlined the history of Silesia, emphasising the fact that this is a region of the permeation and stratification of assorted cultures. Finally, the reader is informed that the content of the album was based on the scientific accomplishments of Silesian archaeologists. The basic part of the album is composed of photographs of archaeological objects and monuments, accompanied by a scientific commentary which contains: a name, a description, dates, cultural affiliation and, in justified cases - the objective, remarks about the technology of execution, the history of extraction, together with the name of the researcher, and a brief depiction of the archaeological site, analogies, and place of storage. The photographs, together with a commentary and the name of the locality from which the monuments and object originate, have been arranged chronologically from the Palaeolithic Age to the Renaissance (sixteenth century). The lavish and high-quality illustrations has been selected extremely carefully, and the publishing house has guaranteed a superior poligraphic standard. The only shortcoming appears to be the absence of a scale in the presentation of the monuments, which makes it impossible to visually determine their size (the actual dimensions are listed in the commentaries). The publication has been outfitted with a selective bibliography. It also contains a map with marked localities in which the monuments presented in the album had been discovered, as well as their index with complete administrative data