You can't step into the same river twice, as they say. But it's also not easy to stand on the same riverbank twice, as rivers are constantly altering their own beds. Which, in the long run, has had a greater impact: nature or mankind?

Jak wiadomo, nie można wejść dwa razy do tej samej rzeki. Niełatwo jest też dwa razy stanąć na tym samym brzegu. Rzeka wciąż modyfikuje swoje koryto. Kto na dłuższą metę ma na to większy wpływ - przyroda czy człowiek?

In this paper we describe a fossil graben and associated normal faults and joints. The graben occurs in the section of the Vistulian (Weichselian) and Holocene sediments in an archaeological excavation site at Brzezie, in the central part of the Polish Carpathian Foredeep (Wieliczka-Gdów Upland, western part of the Sandomierz Basin). Normal faults strike mostly NNE-SSW and dip steeply about 65 - 850. Some of them, namely master normal faults, bound the fossil graben. The joints form orthogonal pattern and are closely spaced close to the faults. They developed simultaneously with faulting. Normal faulting took place during the Vistulian - Mesoholocene (Neoholocene?) time, according to age of the archaeological artefacts which were found in the faulted sediments. The faulting was probably finished during the Neolithic or even later, during the Bronze Age. The NNE-striking normal faults connected with graben formation could have been produced by reactivation of a NE-striking sinistral regional fault in the basement.