In 1933 Walenty Szwajcer, a local teacher on a trip to Lake Biskupin in Poland, noticed timbers in the lake. The following year Professor Józef Kostrzewski began a series of excavations that uncovered a large Iron Age settlement built of timber preserved in marshland at the edge of the lake. As more of the site was revealed, it became apparent that the scale of the find and its exceptional preservation made this one the greatest discoveries in the history of archaeology. The Poles were naturally pretty chuffed, and, sandwiched between Hitler and Stalin, they hadn’t got much else to be chuffed about in the late 1930s.
A plan of the settlement at Biskupin
