This Rare, 6,000-Year-Old Limestone Fertility Figurine Could Be Poland’s Archaeological ‘Find of the Century’
Dating back to the Neolithic era, the so-called Venus of Kolobrzeg is the first artifact of its kind unearthed in the European country
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Archaeologists in Poland have announced that a figurine discovered by a farmer near the city of Kolobrzeg is most likely a symbolic representation of a female fertility goddess, created by the first agricultural settlers along the Baltic coast some 6,000 years ago.
Dubbed the “Venus of Kolobrzeg,” the Neolithic statue measures just under five inches tall. It is carved out of beige limestone and bears fossilized fragments of snail shells, bivalves and marine worms known as polychaetes, according to a statement from the Kolobrzeg-based Polish Arms Museum.
Although small, the figurine “reveals high artistic skill,” the museum adds, per a translation by Notes From Poland’s Daniel Tilles. Its proportions are stylistically distorted, “with an emphasis on showing sexual characteristics.”
Fun facts: What are Venus statuettes?
- In 1864, an amateur French archaeologist discovered an ivory figurine that he dubbed the Venus impudique (“immodest Venus”) as a nod to the Venus pudica (“modest Venus”), a type of classical statue that depicts the Roman goddess Venus covering her breasts and pubic area.
- The name stuck, despite the fact that the prehistoric fertility figurines now known as Venuses predate ancient Rome by tens of thousands of years.
While the figure’s face bears no features and its legs are just barely prominent, its hips and breasts are exaggerated. They show evidence of smoothing, similar to how someone might rub a good luck charm. These are all telltale signs of Neolithic fertility figurines, which may have been used to promote both agricultural prosperity and human fecundity.
A farmer in a village along the Parseta River stumbled onto the statue in 2022. For the past three years, researchers have been working to accurately date the figurine and confirm that it was made by settlers who farmed the lush, river-fed lands of Western Pomerania during the Neolithic era—much further north than fertility figurines for the time period have ever been found.
“In archaeology, significant discoveries are actually caused by two factors. The first is tedious archaeological research, which lasts a very long time, but sometimes spectacular discoveries are made by accident,” Marcin Krzepkowski, an archaeologist with the Relicta Foundation who participated in the research, tells National Geographic Poland’s Jakub Rybski, per a translation by TVP World.
“We needed a lot of time to confirm the authenticity of the figurine and confirm the place of its discovery,” Krzepkowski adds.
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Verifying the date and provenance of the figurine was complex because the Venus of Kolobrzeg was riddled with anomalies. Venus statuettes at the time were more often made of clay than raw stone like marble, sandstone or limestone. They are also without precedent in regions as far north as West Pomerania. Other anthropomorphic fertility figurines from the Neolithic era have been found in Israel, Anatolia and other parts of southern Europe—but never in Poland, according to the statement.
These peculiarities haven’t stopped the Venus of Kolobrzeg from joining the diverse ranks of fertility figurines from around the world, each with their own quirks. The Valdivia figurines, created in coastal Ecuador between about 4000 and 3500 B.C.E., tend to possess both male and female attributes. One female figurine created in Iraq between 5900 and 4000 B.C.E. is described by the British Museum as “suckling a child with a reptilian-like head, held on the left hip.” And the Venus of Hohle Fels—the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being—was crafted out of mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago.
As the Venus of Kolobrzeg enters the collections of the city’s museum, it could rewrite the region’s history as one of the oldest and most unique objects in the institution’s holdings.
“I can safely say that this is the find of the century,” Aleksander Ostasz, the museum’s director, tells National Geographic, per TVP World. “What was discovered … is truly something phenomenal, extraordinary. It absolutely pushes the boundaries of our history of Kolobrzeg.”
