When fishes swim up Danube

Vettersfelde treasure, 6th c. BC golden hoard found in Witaszkowo, Poland in 1882, decorated in the "steppe animal style", and believed to be "of Scythian origin"...You can read my analysis of this treasure in my post "Vettersfelde treasure"...

 

In this article I disputed the Scythian origin of these objects, and instead proposed that they were made by settled fishermen communities somewhere in the Black or Azov Sea area...Reason? Fishes depicted all over these objects...Not something steppe nomads would care about...

I then proposed that these objects were most likely looted by Scythians and somehow eventually ended up in Poland...

But that's not the important part. The important part is the meaning of all these animal symbols in combination with fishes...

You can see that both main objects contain the same three central animal groups: 

1. leopard killing boar

2. lion killing deer

3. fishes

Because boar mate during winter, and leopard mate at the end of winter beginning of spring, leopard killing boar means beginning of spring, Jan/Feb...

Because lions mate during autumn, and deer mate at the end of autumn, lion killing deer means end of autumn, Oct/Nov...

So what about the fish then? At the time when I wrote the original article I was aware that the biggest migratory fish in Central Europe, sturgeon, starts its upstream spawning migration in Feb/Mar, in Pisces🙂...

So I concluded that the meaning of these animal calendars is: Sturgeons, very important source food in the past, start migrating upstream (fishing season begins) after autumn and winter have passed, in the spring, in Pisces...I talked about pisces as a marker for salmon upstream migration in European rivers in my post "Fishes"...I talked about the importance of sturgeons as a food source for the people living along Danube river since Mesolithic in my post "Mesolithic sturgeon fishermen"... 

But the other day i came across this paper about the seasonal migrations of sweet water fish in Danube river, and I realised that I was only partially right...

Sturgeons indeed start their upstream migration in Feb/Mar, but the peak is in Apr/May...And they are not the only fish that seasonally migrate up the Danube river. Carp and shad also seasonally migrate upstream, also peaking in Apr/May...

The fish migration season (and fishing season) begins in Feb/Mar and ends in Jul/Aug/Sep...

Sooooo...knowing this, the meaning of the main "animal - fish" calendar form the Vettersfelde treasure is:

The fish migration season (and fishing season) begins after leopard kills boar (Jan/Feb) and ends before lion kills deer (Oct/Nov)...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...