The Early Neolithic Cultural Transformation in the Targowisko Settlement Region, SE Poland

Abstract The aim of the article is to characterize the early Neolithic settlement region of Targowisko in SE Poland. It is located on the northern edge of the Western Carpathians, 30 km east of Krakow. It functioned during the development of the entire Linear Pottery culture (LBK) and the subsequent Malice culture (MC), in the period from 5300 to 4500 BC. The focus was on the cultural transformation at the turn of the 6th to the 5th millennium BC. Cases of decisive cultural change (e. g. forms and ornamentation of ceramics, dwellings construction, directions of the supply of stone materials, the organization of inhabited space) and cases of continuity (elements of ceramics technology and flint production, continuation of settlement processes and subsistence strategy) were recorded. Cultural change is best represented by the symbolic realm and continuity in the utilitarian realm. These processes were projected onto a reconstructed, dynamic picture of environmental changes recorded in the palynological and geochemical material. Impulses from various cultural environments contributed to the formation of the MC, which proves its heterogeneous character and the complicated course of its genesis.