Band ceramic settlement (Mühlengrund in Rosdorf)
The ceramic band settlement on the Mühlengrund in Rosdorf is a Neolithic settlement of the ceramic band culture in Rosdorf near Göttingen in Lower Saxony .
The around 5500 to 5000 BC The settlement that originated in BC was one of the first rural cultures in Central Europe . In the 1960s, the settlement area, which lies within the present-day location, was excavated on a large scale. In 2016 there was another excavation on a smaller area.
Reference
The site is on the Mühlengrund street within the village of Rosdorf. It is located on a loess ridge, which has an area of about 400 × 800 meters and extends in an east-west direction. The loess here is up to 7 meters thick; above it is 40 to 70 centimeters of fertile black earth as the topsoil . Until the Middle Ages , the loess island was surrounded by a damp lowland, which only became dry when the streams and rivers were regulated. Today the Bach Rase flows north of the site . In the 1960s, a large new building area and a school complex were built on the Neolithic settlement area.
Research history
Rosdorf came into the focus of archaeologists in 1962 when an employee of the Agricultural Chemicals and Soil Science Institute of the University of Göttingen had recovered extensive finds during construction work in Iron Age waste pits . In the following year, 1963, the same employee observed soil discolouration during the construction of the central school in Rosdorf, which pointed to prehistoric settlement remains. A rescue excavation was then carried out in 1963. The excavation was then extended to the area where the remains of the settlement continued. Since land had already been built on, the approximately 250 × 500 meter study area was not contiguous, but consisted of 36 individual areas with a total of 23,000 m². The excavations had the character of emergency rescues, as there was considerable time pressure due to the construction work. The excavations, which were not completed until 1970, were carried out by students from the Department of Prehistory and Protohistory at the University of Göttingen. A coherent scientific evaluation of the excavations is not available to date (2016).
In 2016 there was another excavation in the area of the school property under the direction of the archaeologist Eberhard Kettlitz. It was a rescue excavation that the Göttingen district, as the property owner, had an excavation company undertake. It had become necessary due to a planned rebuilding . For this, the district provided 200,000 euros in its budget . The three-month excavation covered an area of about 3200 m². It led to around 300 results .
Findings
building
During the first archaeological investigations in the 1960s, the archaeologists first removed the dark topsoil from black earth and laid a flat surface on the yellow loess. The former wooden posts stood out as circular, dark discolorations. They were created by black earth that seeped into the space of the past wood from above. The floor plans of 52 houses made of linear ceramics (5500-5000 BC) could be determined.
Dark discoloration of the floor of a post hole , marked with a log, 2016
|
As in other settlements of this type, the walking horizon in Rosdorf , in which there are usually household items and hearths, was not preserved because of the erosion of the loess soil. Although the reconstruction of the rising parts of the house was made more difficult, the findings suggested square post houses at ground level , the roofs of which were supported by rows of three pillars. The middle stand formed the roof ridge. The posts were originally dug up to 2 meters deep into the ground. The outer walls were made of plastered wattle.
Most of the buildings were large structures up to 35 meters long and around 7 meters wide. There were only a few small buildings. The building dimensions varied between 4 and 35 meters in length and between 5 and 7 meters in width. The gables of the larger buildings were mostly oriented to the northwest or southeast.
There are pits between the house floor plans. They are likely to have arisen when the clay was removed for plastering the wattle walls. Maybe they also had a meaning as drainage . Over time, they were filled with substances that archaeologists believe to be garbage. These finds make it possible to classify the settlement in terms of time and culture.
Ceramic and stone finds
Most of the found material comes from the pits next to the buildings. Ceramic inheritance forms the majority of the finds. The clay used in the ceramic vessels is finely muddy, has a smooth surface and has thin walls. Some ceramic fragments can be added to bowls, flat vessels, sumps and large storage vessels. Ornaments are incised, pierced and modeled. Ribbons made of incised lines form the motif that gave the linear ceramic band its name. Only in isolated cases could white and red paint residues be found in the incised lines, which suggest a colored decoration. Red iron stone and brown stone were probably used for dyeing ; both types of stone were among the finds.
Whorls of sound evidence of the textile production . A few grindstones , a few artifacts made of bones and antlers and unworked stones, some of which can be found more than 10 kilometers away, complete the find material . The numerous millstones made of mill quartzite were used to grind the grain . The millstones came from the Kattenbühl elevation in Hann, 20 km away . Münden .
Compared to other ceramic settlement sites, a small number of stone tools were recovered in Rosdorf. These include ground flat hoes and so-called shoe last wedges made of rock. Only 140 pieces of flint artifacts were found. The low number is due to the lack of flint deposits in the vicinity of the settlement area, which do not occur on loess soil. Investigations have shown that the flint used occurs in Alfeld, 50 km away, and in Bramburg, 16 km away . Flint was mainly processed into blades . As traces of use show, part of it may have been composed of sickles . There was a so-called sickle shine on the blades . It is caused by frequent cutting of silicon-containing plants, such as B. reeds that were used to cover house roofs.
Plant remains and bone finds
Soil samples were taken in order to gain knowledge about the cultivated plant varieties and thus about the plant-based diet of the inhabitants of that time. They had a considerable size with 580 samples, including a batch of 83 samples with a mass of 2.05 tons.
The archaeobotanical evaluation of the soil samples showed:
The hazelnut was collected as a wild fruit .
Burial places were not found. In contrast, the skeletal remains of a child at the age of about 5 were lying in a pit. Finds of animal bones prove the existence of domestic animals. The beef was of particular importance and was characterized by its considerable size for this period. In addition, the domestic pig and (not yet distinguishable from the bone material found) the sheep or goat are represented. The hunt for wild animals played a subordinate role.
Excavation 2016
During the excavation from July to September 2016 on the school property, 300 findings were found, including settlement pits and three new house floor plans. Two of the houses belong to the older phase and one to the younger phase of ceramic tape. The recovered finds include utensils made of ceramic and stone. The ceramic fragments found show the typical decorative forms of ribbon ceramics with incised ribbons. On the basis of the decorations, they can be traced back to the middle level of ribbon ceramics between 5300 and 5150 BC. Assign. The stone artefacts include sickle blades, a flint arrowhead, adze blades and stone wedges for woodworking.
Résumé
The old excavations in the 1960s and the new excavation in 2016 led to a total of 55 established house floor plans from the time of the ceramic culture, whereby the number that actually existed may have been higher. On the basis of the C14 dating, the ceramic band population in Rosdorf is estimated to be around 700 years. It is believed that there were no more than three or four houses at the same time. A closed village cannot be assumed, but rather individual farms in a loose distribution. In later epochs there were other discontinuous settlements at the site, as indicated by the remains of settlements from the Bronze Age , the Iron Age , the Latène Age and the Roman Empire .
The ribbon ceramic settlement on the Mühlengrund is the largest archaeologically investigated settlement from the Stone Age in Lower Saxony, as well as the largest examined settlement in the northern edge area of the distribution area of ribbon ceramic cultures in Central Europe. Overall, the settlement has not been completely excavated, which is also due to the partial development of the settlement area that has already taken place. In addition, the settlement limits in the north and west were not reached during the investigations. The previous investigations made it possible to analyze arable farming and vegetable nutrition of the first arable farmers and cattle breeders in southern Lower Saxony . Therefore, the results of the excavations are of supraregional importance for the research of linear ceramics.
literature
- Reinhard Maier: Preliminary report on the excavation of the ceramic band settlement in Rosdorf, Kr. Göttingen in: Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 36, 1964, pp. 67-69.
- Reinhard Maier, Hans-Günter Peters: Prehistoric settlement traces in Rosdorf, Kr. Göttingen in: Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 37, 1965, p. 82.
- Wolf Haio Zimmermann : An excavation of prehistoric settlements on the Mühlengrund in Rosdorf, Kr. Göttingen in: Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 38, 1966, pp. 58–59.
- Brigitte Schlüter: Prehistoric remains of settlements in Rosdorf, Kr. Göttingen. Preliminary report on the excavations in 1969 and 1970 in: Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte 40, 1971, p. 236 ff.
- Brigitte Schlüter: The ceramic band settlement on the Mühlengrund in Rosdorf, district of Göttingen. Reprint from: Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Nordwestdeutschland. Supplement 1., editor Günter Wegner , publisher: State Museum for Natural History and Prehistory Oldenburg , Oldenburg 1983.
- Jan Graefe: Ceramic and late Hallstatt millstones from the Rosdorf settlement "Mühlengrund", district of Göttingen. In: Frank Verse, Benedikt Knoche, Jan Graefe, Martin Hohlbein, Kerstin Schierhold, Claudia Siemann, Marion Uckelmann, Gisela Woltermann (eds.), Through the Times ... Festschrift for Albrecht Jockenhövel on his 65th birthday. International Archeology - Studia honoraria 28. Rahden / Westfalen 2008, pp. 15–28.
- Wiebke Kirleis, Ulrich Willerding : The remains of plants from the linear ceramic settlement of Rosdorf-Mühlengrund, district of Göttingen, in southeastern Lower Saxony. Prehistoric Journal 83, 2008, pp. 133–178. ( Online , pdf)
- Andrea Bulla: A 7,000 year old settlement: The first farmers and cattle breeders in Göttingen-Rosdorf in: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony , 4/2016, pp. 201–202.
- Brigitte Schlüter, Wolfgang Schlüter : The post-band ceramic findings and finds from Mühlengrund in Rosdorf, Ldkr. Göttingen in: Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte 87, 2018, p. 69 ff.
Web links
- Eva Werler: 7,000 years of house building history in Rosdorf at ndr.de from July 28, 2016
- Video film about the excavation 2016 on Sat 1 from September 7, 2016 (2:55 minutes)
- In Rosdorf there were farmers 7,000 years ago with 2 video films on ndr.de from September 7, 2016
- 7000 year old finds in Rosdorf settlement discovered in Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine on September 7, 2016
- Blades, wedges and houses in the Göttinger Tageblatt from September 7, 2016
- Brief description of the site and of the plant investigation in an investigation project since 2002
Individual evidence
- ^ Excavations at the former Anne Frank School in: Göttinger Tageblatt of July 28, 2016
- ↑ Excavation: Rosdorf finds could be more than 7000 years old in Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine from July 30, 2016
- ↑ Archaeologists uncover a large Stone Age settlement , in: Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine from August 30, 2016.
Coordinates: 51 ° 30 '16.6 " N , 9 ° 54' 17.4" E