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Fig- 71. The stoi»e walls around the peak of Góra Dobrzeszowska. 1 - the internal wali; 2 - the middle wali; 3 - the extemal wali; 4 - the wali across the ridge; 5,6 - steps hewn in rock. After E. Gąssowska, 1979, p. 124.

p. 125). This sculpture is an intriguing problem unsettled until the present day (Reinfuss, 1989, p. 26-29, Gąssowska, Kuczyński, 1975), it seems that the closest analogies are the ńtzńa-stones of the steppe peoples and similar scuLptures frotn Podolia, probably of Slavonic origin.

The excavations carried out on Łysieć by J. and E. Gąssowscy (1970, p. 28-43), severely criticised by historians (Derwich, 1992, p. 176-179) re-sulted in a plan of the walls and established that the culture layer around them was fonned between the 7th and 9th c. According to J. Gąssowski, thanks to a elear stratigraphy of one of the sites, it was also possible to

Fig. 72. "Gródek Leśny” (Forest Stronghold) on Góra Puszcza near Przysucha. I-IV - walls; 1-5 - excavation sites; A, B, C - inter-wall areas. After Z. Lechowicz, 1982, p. .

delimit that the wali was built between the 8th and mid 1 Oth c. According to E. Gąssowska and Z. Woźniak (1980), in 1979 traces of a transverse wali were also found there. No traces of holes, houses or fire-places from the Middle Ages were discovered (although many pottery fragments were found), which allowed to exclude the dwelling character of the structures on Łysieć. The attempts at dating this site to earlier period (Gąssowska, 1975; Łowmiański, 1979, p. 231) are unconvincing, as they are based on the anai-ogy between the wali on Łysieć and the walls on Ślęża (Derwich, 1992, p. 37), whose early dating is doubtful.

There are also several other peaks surrounded with stone walls too Iow to be regarded as any defense structures, not mentioned in any sources. We can list the archaeologically explored walls on Góra Dobrzeszowska (Gąssowska, 1979), Góra Puszcza near Przysucha (Lechowicz, 1982), and remains of walls on Góra Grodowa in Tumlin (Kuczyński, Pyzik, 1967), all dated to the early Middle Ages. No excavations have been carried out in the interesting walls around Góra Chełmno (Kamińska, 1958), which according to Długosz {Annales, I, vol. 1, 1964, p. 104), was “the mountain of the Sieradz region” with “a brick church surrounded with seven deep moats, founded by Peter, comes of Skrzynno.” All those hills belong to the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. There were some suppositions conceming a simi-lar function of the walls encircling Palenica in the Silesian Beskid Mountains (Szydłowski, 1968) and the hill Grodzisko near Jaworzno, on which no

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