Drewniane flety proste z wykopalisk archeologicznych na terenie Europy

The article describes twelve recorders excavated from archaeological sites dating back to the Mediaeval times and the Renaissance. Three of them are in the museums in Germany, two in the Netherlands and one in Estonia. Six are in Polish museum collections. The flutes from five locations (Puck, Nysa, Płock, Toruń and Warsaw) are described in this paper for the first time. All the instruments from the Polish territory have been accurately measured and identified for the kind of wood from which they were made. All the flutes were made from one piece of wood of the following tree genera: lilac (Nysa, Płock), plum (Dordrecht, Göttingen), cherry (Würzburg), maple (Elblag, Toruń, Tartu), boxwood (Esslingen, Amsterdam) and spruce (Puck, Warsaw). The oldest known recorders were primarily made of fruit tree wood (Würzburg, Dordrecht, Göttingen). Interesting was the use of spruce wood (softwood) for making aerophones, absent in the later preserved instruments of this type.