Amber Moose from Weitsche

The amber moose from Weitsche is a figure of an amber moose made in the late Paleolithic , the individual parts of which were found between 1994 and 2004 near the Lüchow district of Weitsche in Lower Saxony . The almost 14,000 year old figure is exhibited in the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover . It is considered to be the earliest representation of a moose and the first representation of animals in the northern European lowlands.

Reference

The site is located in the Hanoverian Wendland in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district in the Jeetzel floodplain between Dannenberg and Lüchow. In a narrower sense, this is an area between Grabow and Weitsche on the Alte Jeetzel , a meandering and parallel-flowing side arm. There are remains of more than 100 Stone Age camp sites in a 20 hectare site. The 30 individual parts of the amber elk were found at the Weitsche 1 storage site together with around 20 other fragments of worked amber, which, according to the prehistoric historian Stephan Veil, suggests a Stone Age amber workshop. In addition, thousands found on artifacts of flint in the area. The site is located in the river area close to the groundwater and was regularly flooded in spring until the Jeetzel was regulated in the 1950s. Only then was the land used for agriculture. The finds were all recovered in the uppermost soil layer , an approximately 25 cm thick plow horizon. In order to reconstruct the landscape situation at the end of the last Ice Age , geoscientific investigations by the Institute for Geosystems and Bioindications at the TU Braunschweig were carried out at the site from 2007 to 2012 . They were carried out as an interdisciplinary project with other research institutions such as the Institute for Geobotany at the University of Hanover , the Helmholtz Center Potsdam and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research .

description

The elk head found in 2004

The elk figure is about the size of a palm and has a length of about ten cm. It shows an animal with its head lowered to the ground and about four cm long. The amber surface was originally honey yellow and polished. Over the millennia it was given a reddish brown patina and became matt. Nevertheless, the found material is extremely well preserved, which is due to the damp storage under airtight layers of clay and exclusion of light. The individual body parts, such as legs, torso, head and neck with dewlap , appear realistically proportioned. There is no tail. While the torso and legs appear schematic, the head is more carefully worked. The eyes, auditory canals and nostrils are reproduced in a natural and plastic way. The mouth incision is marked with eight drilled holes on each side of the body. The neck is decorated with an engraved diamond band that is supposed to represent the mane. Because of the lack of antlers, the animal is regarded as a cow elk.

In comparison with other dated finds, the figure is typologically assigned to the Late Paleolithic (12,500–9700 BC). A technical dating was carried out using the radiocarbon method , whereby not the material of the figure but bone charcoal from the immediate context of the find was examined. This resulted in a time of around 11,700 BC. The earlier function of the elk figure is not known. Prehistorians suggest that it could have been a stick attachment. Such representations can be found on post-glacial rock art in Scandinavia.

The amber elk by Weitsche is similar to the antler- made elk sculpture that was discovered in 1914 near Bonn in the 14,000-year-old double grave of Oberkassel . A similar amber sculpture of a moose was found on Næsby Beach on the west coast of the island of Zealand in Denmark in 2015 .

Discovery and excavation

In the mid-1980s, the Berlin hobby archaeologist Klaus Breest undertook field inspections in the Jeetzel floodplain near Weitsche . In doing so, he came across traces of Stone Age camp sites that had come to the surface through plowing. From 1991, his finds prompted a systematic prospecting for flint tools and waste. It was carried out by the Prehistory Department of the Lower Saxony State Museum under the prehistoric Stephan Veil. Around 100 storage places were found by groups of penknife who lived here as early forest hunters at the transition from the last Ice Age to the Post Ice Age about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago . During a field inspection in May 1994, a processed piece of amber was found. An excavation in August 1994 led to the discovery of several artefacts made of amber, which, when put together, resulted in the torso of an animal, which the researchers initially assumed to be a wild horse . In subsequent excavations in 1995 and 1996, other parts, including the rear legs and the neck, were recovered. The head was not found at the time, so that sponsors for the excavation costs of 50,000 DM were required for further searches . In a new excavation campaign in 2004, the figure's missing head was found. Because of the small finds, the archaeological measures required the silting and sieving of the soil layer that led to the find , which was done mechanically. Until the head was found, around 700 m³ of soil were examined in this way.

meaning

The amber moose by Weitsche, almost 14,000 years old, is the oldest work of art in Lower Saxony and the earliest depiction of animals made of amber among a dozen well-known animal figures made from this material. The figure was created at the end of the Ice Age, when forests had formed due to global warming, in which the first forest hunters hunted moose. The forest hunter culture replaced the steppe hunter culture of the previous Magdalenian era , whose imagery featured reindeer and mammoths .

Prehistorians see the amber moose by Weitsche as a key find for understanding the development of art in the late Ice Age. The cultural-historical significance of the elk figure is based on the fact that only a few artistic expressions are known from the people of this period ( penknife groups ). Most of them are abstract, geometric patterns on rock; Representations of humans and animals are very rare. The previous steppe hunter cultures, on the other hand, were more artistic and painted caves like Altamira in Spain or Ignatievka in the Urals with pictures. From this, scientific research has so far concluded that the forest hunter cultures have become artistically impoverished, although the high-quality amber animal shows this assessment in a different light.

literature

Stephan Veil: Weitsche FStNr. 16 Gde. Stadt Lüchow, Ldkr. Lüchow-Dannenberg, Reg. Bez. Lüneburg in: Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte 66, 1997, Fundchronik Niedersachsen 1996, pp. 359f.
Stephan Veil, J. Altenbernd, Klaus Breest: Weitsche FStNr. 16, City of Lüchow, Ldkr. Lüchow-Dannenberg, Reg.Bez. Luneburg. in: News from Lower Saxony's prehistory, supplement 1, 1998, Fundchronik Niedersachsen 1997, pp. 15-17 ( online )
Stephan Veil: Archeology as a serialized novel: The discovery of the amber animal by Weitsche 1994–1996. in: Reports on the preservation of monuments in Lower Saxony , 1/1997
Stephan Veil, Klaus Breest: The archaeological findings of the art objects made of amber on the pen knife discovery site Weitsche. The excavations 1994–1998. In: Die Kunde NF 51, 2000 p. 179f.
Stephan Veil, Klaus Breest: Art in the Change between Ice Age and Warm Age. Amber objects formerly forest hunters from Weitsche, Ldkr. Lüchow-Dannenberg In: Mamoun Fansa , Frank Both, Henning Haßmann (editor): Archeology | Land | Lower Saxony. 400,000 years of history. State Museum for Nature and Man, Oldenburg 2004. Pages 352–354
Stephan Veil, Klaus Breest: Amber objects from Weitsche. The art of the late Ice Age in: Michael Baales , Thomas Terberger (editor): Welt im Wandel. Life at the end of the last ice age , special issue 10/2016 of the journal Archeology in Germany , pp. 67–77