Talayotic house by Biniparratx Petit

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Talayotic house by Biniparratx Petit Casa talaiótica de Biniparratx Petit
View from the south: Left the hypostyle, right behind the talayotic house

View from the south: Left the hypostyle, right behind the talayotic house
Talayotic house of Biniparratx Petit (Balearic Islands)
Red pog.svg

Location in Menorca
Coordinates 39 ° 51 '57 .5 "  N , 4 ° 13' 41.5"  E Coordinates: 39 ° 51 '57  .5 " N , 4 ° 13' 41.5"  E
place Sant Lluís , Balearic Islands , Spain
Emergence 4th century BC Chr.
Dimensions 11 m
height 77  m

The Talayotic House of Biniparratx Petit (also Biniparratxet Petit ) is a prehistoric residential building on the Balearic island of Menorca . The Iron Age structure dates from the 4th century BC. BC and is assigned to the late or post-Talayotic phase of the Talayotic culture . It was in 1995 at the southern end of the runway of the Menorca airport excavated and to its current location in the green area in front of the airport building translocated .

description

Schematic floor plan
A - Hypostyl
B - round house

The house is a round building with an inner courtyard and an annex next to the entrance gate. This type of building, also known as Cercle ( Catalan circle ), is characteristic of the late Alayotic settlements in Menorca and is found exclusively on this island. All the cercles found are very similar in size, shape and room layout. These are windowless round buildings that are bordered by a double-walled wall. On the outside, the wall is made up of large, flat stone blocks. The inner wall, on the other hand, consists of much smaller stones. The space between the walls is filled with rubble and earth. The total area of ​​the Talayotic House of Biniparratx Petit is 128 m². Of this, only 63 m² were usable, the rest of the area is made up of the double outer wall and the partition walls inside.

The only access to the talayotic house is the entrance gate in the south (3), next to which - still outside - there is a cistern. The door posts are each formed by three large stones stacked on top of each other. Above it is a cuboid monolith as a lintel . The open inner courtyard (4) is entered through the gate, around which the rooms of the house are arranged radially. The courtyard is bordered by five free-standing columns that once supported the roof and on which the partition walls between the individual rooms are attached. The north-eastern part of the courtyard is enclosed by a semicircular wall and contains the fireplace (5). There is a small cistern (6) in the northwest corner . This can also have been a kind of house altar, as several parts of a sacrificial cup were found at its bottom .

The largest room (10) is in the north of the house. Due to the natural slope of the underground, it is slightly higher than the other rooms and is accessed via three steps. There are three pilasters on its outer wall . In the most distant corner to the east of the room there is a larger depression in the floor - either a cistern or a storage facility. According to the information board, it could have been a work room, but there are also indications in similar cercles at other sites that the large northern room could have served as a bedroom or as a place to store food.

If the northern room was a work room, then rooms 8 and 9 west of the inner courtyard were probably used for sleeping. Finds in other cercles identify them as storage rooms or small workshops. Recesses in the door posts show that the entrances could be closed by doors. The narrow room (7) adjoining it to the south was certainly a storage room. The room (11) on the east side of the house contains a waste pit for ash residues (12). It may have served as a meeting room or dining room.

To the left of the entrance, a hypostyle is built directly onto the outer wall of the house. It is a characteristic building type of the Talayotic culture, which can often be found as an extension of post-Talayotic round houses, but also standing in the open field outside the settlements (like Es Galliner de Madona ). Unlike the cercles , which were covered by a roof made of branches, clay and small stones, a hypostyle has a ceiling made of large, flat stone slabs that rest on pilasters and polylithic columns. The hypostyle of Biniparratx Petit's house still has four of the original ceiling tiles. Five pilasters and three columns have been preserved inside. The building occupies an area of ​​35 m² with a usable area of ​​12 m². Originally it consisted of only one room. The current partition was built in the 1st century BC. Moved in. It is believed that Hypostyloi were granaries.

  • Views

  • Entrance gate

  • Fire pit in the courtyard

  • Pilasters in the northern room

  • West side of the courtyard with the entrances to rooms 8 and 9, on the right perhaps a house altar

  • East side of the inner courtyard: View into room 11 with the waste pit

  • Megalithic outer walls of the house

  • View of the hypostyle from the east, a cistern in front

Excavation history

Menorca has an extensive archaeological heritage. On an area of ​​about 700 km² there are over 1500 sites, of which about 1400 are legally protected as Bien de Interés Cultural . In 1964, the construction of Menorca Airport affected or destroyed some of the prehistoric sites. In the south, the airport site overlaps with the prehistoric settlement of Biniparratx Petit. Located in the west of the municipality of Sant Lluís at an altitude of 77  m and about 2.3 km from the sea, this archaeological site has been a listed building since 1966 . The most striking building in the settlement is a talayot - a tower-like structure whose function has not yet been fully clarified. To the south of it, Maria Lluïsa Serra (1911–1967) carried out a first excavation in 1967. The results have not been published, but some finds in the collections of the Museu de Menorca that are attributed to Biniparratx Petit are likely to have come from this excavation.

When the security area at the southern end of the taxiway was expanded in the 1990s, parts of the former settlement threatened to be destroyed. The airport operator Aena agreed with the Commission for Monument Protection (Comisión del Patrimonio Histórico-Artístico) and the responsible bodies of the Island Council (Consell Insular de Menorca) to investigate the effects of the construction work on the archaeological site and, if necessary, to take measures to protect it seize. In 1993 Joan C. de Nicolás Mascaró carried out an archaeological survey of the affected area. Even before the dense vegetation was removed, a monolithic pillar supporting a ceiling slab could be seen 20 m west of the talayot ​​and about 100 m north of Serra's former excavation site. It turned out that it was only the visible part of a comparatively well-preserved, almost circular apartment building, on the outer wall of which there were the remains of a hypostyle.

The excavation - again carried out by Joan C. de Nicolás Mascaró - took place from mid-January to late April 1995. Although the work focused on the talayotic house, twice as large an area - a total of 362 m² - was exposed to examine its connection to other structures in the settlement with which it was once a unit. The excavation revealed a large number of pet bones and clam shells that provided clues about the diet of the former residents. In addition, numerous fragments of ceramic vessels from different phases of settlement were found. Although no radiocarbon analysis was performed, the ceramic can be used to determine its age. Accordingly, the house was initially from the 4th to the 3rd century BC. Inhabited, but was then abandoned. In the 2nd century BC A second period of use began. This lasted until the Roman conquest of the Balearic Islands in 123 BC. At least parts of the house were built from the 1st century BC. Used again until the 1st century AD.

In order to meet both the requirements of monument protection and the interests of the airport operator, it was decided to move the house to a new location. The choice fell on a green area opposite the exit from the airport car park. In preparation for the reconstruction of the house, an exact measurement of the site was carried out and all stones were numbered. The uneven subsurface of the house was replicated at the new location with a concrete foundation. After the stones, some of which weighed several tons, had been transported to the installation site, the house was reconstructed true to the original in the summer of 1995.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Antoni Nicolau Martí, Elena Sintes Olives, Ricard Pla Boada, Albert Àlvarez Marsal: Talayotic Minorca . The prehistory of the island. Triangle Books, Sant Lluís 2015, ISBN 978-84-8478-640-5 , pp. 75-79 (English).
  2. ↑ a b c J. C. de Nicolás et al. : Indicis d'un santuari punico-talaiòtic en el poblat de Biniparratx Petit (Sant Lluís) , 2017
  3. ↑ Got talaiòtic d'ofrenes de Biniparratx Petit . Collection item of the month, Museu de Menorca, 2015, Maó, accessed on September 18, 2017 (Catalan).
  4. ↑ a b c d Information board at the Talayotic House, viewed on September 26, 2016
  5. ↑ a b c d J. C. de Nicolás Mascaró: Casa prehistórica en el Aeropurto de Menorca , 1997
  6. ^ Talayotic Culture of Minorca , on the Spanish tentative list at UNESCO, accessed on September 14, 2017.
  7. ↑ Corinna Kortemeier: Reconstruction of the prehistoric settlement and landscape development on Menorca (Balearic Islands / Spain) (PDF; 11.4 MB), dissertation, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel , Kiel 2014
  8. ↑ Victor Guerrero Ayuso et al. : Biniparratx Petit (Sant Lluís): A research and re-evaluation project in the southeast of the island of Minorca . V. International Conference of Prehistory. Deià, September 2001. BAR International Series 1095, Oxford 2002, pp. 502–516 (English)

Web links

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