The paper outlines a fragment of the history of the study of the images on the Pomeranian culture burial pottery. For the purpose of the paper, the Pomeranian and the Cloche Grave cultures are treated as two different cultural units. The first systematic description of the Pomeranian culture funeral pottery was presented by E. Förstemann in 1850, but only in 1870 did R. Virchow provide the first comprehensive interpretation of the images on these vessels. He presumed that the idea of face urns (or even the very people who made them) came from Etruria and dated such pottery to the Bronze/Iron Age. Virchow identified some representations of i.e. tetrapods, pins or spears and noticed original earrings in the ears of the urns. On the other hand, having analysed representations of faces on the urns W. Mannhardt (1870) recognized two race types and believed canopies to have been substitutes of a corpse. G. Berendt (1872) was the first to present a collection of all known face urns. He assumed such urns to have been only imitations of the human body, and thus rejected the idea of classifying race types. He identified several representations and discriminated between narrative scenes (interpreting a scene on the urn from Gdynia-Redłowo as that of hunting) and symbolic representations (i.e. pins replacing mouth). Berendt dated the face urns to the first century BC. J. N. Sadowski (1872) was the first to explicitly argue that items pictured on the urns were used by the dead in life. A. Voss assumed all representations on urns to have pictured real objects (1877, 1878), while G. Ossowski (1879) estimated the sex of a dead person in the urn on the basis of the representations on the vessel. According to M. Hoernes (1898), face urns represented the epiphany of a chthonic goddess of death and fertility, whereas O. Olshausen (1899) aimed to identify and date representations of alleged pins, brooches and combs. The views of various researchers regarding the images on the Pomeranian culture burial pottery, as presented above, determined the subject matter addressed by the majority of further scholars who interpreted the representations. The analysis of the symbolic status of the representation of the face on such pottery have remained the central research question. Three ways of interpreting this phenomenon have been suggested: (1) the face is a realistic portrait of the buried person; (2) the face is a symbolic portrait of a buried person; (3) an urn is an image of a goddess of the Magna Mater type.