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20 JACEK LECH

of obtaining raw materials in prehistorie Europę. We in-clude here A. L. Armstrong’s typology worked out on the base of many years excavation works at Grime’s Graves (1926), the scheme of M. Jahn based on the carc-fully collected literaturę on the subject (1960) and its cxpansion — “systematic classification of flint obtaining methods” by E. Schmid (1973a). As a fourth typology we can treat the scheme of the division of sites which were connectcd with stone raw materiał exploitation and Processing by N. N. Gurina (1970, 589; 1976, 5). The classification adopted here is an adaptation and expan-sion of Schmid’s typology. An attempt is also madę to define morę precisely thesc exploitation systems.

Methods of obtaining stone raw materials among primitive communitics:

A.    Natural collecting.

B.    Mining:

1.    Systematic extraction from sea-shore slides, glaci-fiuvial and alluvial gravel trains, glacial tills and Karatic clays together with casual local turning up of the soil.

2.    Surfacc pits.

3.    Open shafts.

4.    Open shafts with underground side workings.

5.    Underground shafts with niches.

6.    Underground shafts with galleries and stalls.

7.    Drift mining.

8.    Horizontal mining changing into drift mining.

C.    Quarrying.

In the proposed classification the basie difierencc betwcen natural collecting and mining consists in the fact that the deposit is the objective of mining exploita-tion. Natural collecting is limited to the casual gathering of rocks coming from difterent sources, mainly from out-crops. Only in this way can we sensibly distinguish systematic extraction connectcd with turning up of the soil in sea-shore slides, postglacial and Holocene river gravel trains, which were the raw materiał deposits, from casual collecting of all siliceous rocks mainly from the out-crops or the surface rather than systematically exploited deposits. We cannot ignore the significance of natural flint collecting which providcd prehistorie communitics with their raw materiał. The border linę between the conscious exploitation and casual collecting should follow L. Vertes’ definition (1964, 205 f.). In this way for exam-ple sporadic appearances of Świeciechów and “chocolate” flint in the middle and upper Palaeolithic period at con-siderablc distanccs from the deposits (Kozłowski 1958, 355-357; 1967, 22; 1972, 62 f., 91 f.; Balcer 1971, 24; Schild, 1971, 40) is only a proof of obtaining the raw materiał through natural collecting while the occurrence of flint workshops based on the raw materiał eroded in moraines or originating from river gravel trains would be a sufficient to show mining exploitation, planned earlier and realized in the simplest of all possible ways. In such a formulation, the natural collection of raw materiał means something diflerent than in E. Schmid’s conception. It refers only to picking up raw materiał from outerops and the casual collecting on the area of deposits.

1. MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SIMPLEST MINING

We can talk about mining exploitation at the moment when the existence of systematic util ization of a deposit finds its reflection as flint workshops which processed raw materials. As a rule, the last activity was accompa-nied by at least simple extractive work. It consisted in turning up the soil and removing the materiał without any industrial value. Such activities were already ascer-tained among others in some traditional Central-Euro-pean cultures in the Upper Palaeolithic period (Kozłowski 1967), and for the later periods at the gorge of the Warta valley through the Poznań High Plain, in the region of Poznań-Starołęka (Kobusiewicz 1967, 60-65). From this arca we know flint workshops of Mesolithic food-gathering and hunting communities, and of the TRB communities. A similar system of exploitation was ascer-tained for the Danubian communities in the region of Kraków-Nowa Huta (Kaczanowska 1971, passim).

The best example of the exploitation unit which was connccted with the systematic extrusion of the VoIhynian flint from glacial tills or Karatic clays was provided by

I. K. Sveśnikov, who studied the hill Visnevaya Góra, in the village of Gorodok, dist. Rovne (1969, 114 f.). It was well prcserved because the ground had been co-vered with a layer of loess flowing down the slope. The depth of the exploitation pit was 10-30 cm, the diameter 180-200 cm (Fig. 20). It was accompanied by a waste heap, 56 cm high on the edge of the pit and approx. 2 cm on the oppositc extremity. On one side of this smali exploitation unit there was an agglomeration of uscless nodules with negatives of single strikings, fiakes and waste (Fig. 21). In the place where the flint bearing layer was washed away by rain water, a runnel formed on the slope of Visnevaya Góra. Strong erosion could have been the result of a single catastrophic rainfall in thecon-ditions of the primeval vegetation. The erosive action of such a rainfall was dcscribed for the Ojców National Park in the Polish Jura ncar Cracow by J. Kondracki (1937). Anthropogenic devastation of the natural envi-ronment could have been another reason of finding the deposit. The pit that we here mentioncd was situated on