Buchsweiler (desert)
Buchsweiler is a desert area northwest of March-Holzhausen im Breisgau in southwest Baden-Württemberg . The settlement probably reached back to Roman times and went under by the end of the 15th century at the latest .
geography
The Buchsweiler area is located in the Holzhausen district in the upper Kapellenacker area and is around half a kilometer away from today's Holzhauser town center. The settlement is located northwest of Holzhausen, a little above the road that leads to Bottingen .
The former settlement is now between 0.8 and 1.2 m below the surface. The areas above are used for agriculture today. No terrain points, remains of buildings, etc. protrude from the field. Therefore, absolutely nothing can be seen of the Buchsweiler settlement today.
In Holzhausen the street that leads through the old town center is still called Buchsweilerstraße . Some historical sources assume that it was originally a parallel street to Bottinger Straße and that its northern extension led to Buchsweiler Platz . Geographically, this is quite likely, but by no means a reliable finding. In Bottingen, the Buchsweilerstraße there also points to the former settlement.
history
The first mention of the desert of Buchsweiler goes hand in hand with the mention of a parish church in an entry in the so-called liber decimationis , a tithe directory of the Diocese of Constance . It was laid out in the years 1274/1275. There it says: Plebanus in Buhswil iuravit de ecclesia ... The sources hardly provide any information about the actual settlement. For the 14th and 15th centuries, only a stately Fronhof is directly tangible, which is mentioned in a listing of the Adelhauser monastery in 1327 . The yard, on which the church set also hung, was sold to the St. Trudpert monastery in January 1402 . A little later followed incorporation of Buchsweiler church. At this point in time, the settlement had probably already fallen. Because according to the incorporation document, the parish once had many parishioners, but the parish was almost completely wiped out by epidemics and wars. In 1493, the ecclesia Buchswiler was referred to as mortua (Burger & Zell), from which it can be concluded that there was no more community to be supplied and that the settlement was definitely gone at this point. The Buchsweiler Church existed until modern times due to the initiative of individual noblemen . However, mass was only read there once a week . In 1605, the local lord of Holzhausen, Andreas von Harsch, obtained permission from the Bishop of Konstanz to renovate the now neglected church building. As an extension, the church got a brother house to prevent the church / chapel from deteriorating further. When the last chapel brother Michael Groß died in 1790 , reported the former Holzhauser pastor Kupferschmitt in 1821, the brother house and the church building were soon completely torn down. It can be assumed that in the decades that followed, the former settlement area of Buchsweiler was completely cleared of rubble and the areas leveled. From this point in time, the desert should have got its current appearance.
Localization
With the demolition of the last buildings in Buchsweiler, the knowledge about the exact location of the desert soon disappeared. In all subsequent literatures, the exact location of Buchsweiler was always described imprecisely, or it was omitted entirely. In 1960 the historian Professor Dr. Helmut Maurer to localize the location more precisely. On the one hand, he identified various parcels based on today's field names ; On the other hand he appointed the former church site on the basis of a historic district plan from 1774. In this is at a branching off from the current road Bottinger the settlement Buchsweiler Grasweg located. It shows a building marked as a church (marked with a red cross), which Maurer equated with the Buchsweiler church. Based on the sharp bend in the grass path, this area can also be identified on today's maps. It is the parcel 827 on the "Oberer Kapellenacker" estate, which was also distinguished by a different parceling until the half of the 20th century . Nevertheless, the investigations at that time to find the Buchsweiler church did not lead to the desired success. It was not until the spring of 1999 that a local commuter led to the precise localization of the alleged area. Due to pendulum swings, he created three probes. A wall was actually discovered in one of the pits at a depth of 1.2 meters. The responsible monument office was informed on the basis of this finding.
If you want to visit the area today, go to Bottinger Straße out of town. About 50 meters after the junction to the old waterworks on "Heuweg", a grass path branches off to the left down the slope. The place where the remains of the foundations of the Buchsweiler church were located are roughly in the area of the sharp bend of the described grass path, halfway to the slope on the right-hand side, about 10 meters west of the path.
Archaeological evidence
The findings from 1999 were poorly preserved, approx. 80 cm wide remains of the wall. Further along this wall, several human bones were recovered. Based on the investigations by the State Monuments Office, the bones could be assigned to three human individuals. Since the remains of the wall and foundations, as well as any other findings, were not endangered, a more detailed examination by the authorities was refused.
There was, however, the opportunity to carry out a geomagnetic investigation as part of the “present-day landscape genesis ” . Archaeologists from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg prospected an area of the parcel of around 110 × 50 meters with a cesium steam probe. The aim of the investigation was to determine whether there are structures in the underground that suggest a church building. The resulting magnetogram shows different contrasts, with the light to whitish areas representing negative (raised) and the dark to black positive (recessed) anomalies. The overall structure (white lines) located in the center of the picture and oriented in a west-east direction is the most striking finding. Due to its shape and its considerable size of approx. 22 × 12 meters, the building can actually be referred to as the former church of Buchsweiler .
A large number of smaller positive anomalies / pits can be observed over a large part of the investigation area (circle signature). Since these form regular rows and are partly at right angles to one another, they are to be interpreted as so-called post pits (D. Guldin), which represent the remains of wooden post structures. It is precisely this type of construction that speaks in favor of settling the square long before the historical sources began to appear in the early medieval period. The fact that a large part of the post pits are in close spatial proximity to the building speaks for a time before the construction of the church. There was once a cemetery around the church , as the bone finds suggest. The historical district maps mark out the adjoining areas around the property as agricultural areas that are still cultivated today. It is therefore unlikely that the post pits were later structural measures. Rather, they should belong to an older settlement phase.
In addition to medieval to early modern times, a Roman period can also be expected, which is indicated by finds of fragments of Roman bricks and a Roman denarius dated to AD 184 . The timing of the church building could not be clarified. Because in the more than 500-year tangible history of the Buchsweiler church, various expansion and renovation phases or even completely new buildings can be expected.
Additional information on the dating of the findings and thus on the development of the former settlement of Buchsweiler could provide future archaeological research.
literature
- M. Burger & Zell: Registra subsidii charitativi in the diocese of Constance at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century. First part: The subsidium charitativium in Archidiakonat Breisgau from 1493 , in: Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 24, 1895, pp. 183-237
- Helmut Maurer : On the localization of the abandoned Buchsweiler settlement , in: Schau-ins-Land 78, 1960, pp. 110–116
- Thomas Steffens (community March): On the history of Buchsweiler , in: Holzhausen - Ein Dorf der March (1995), pp. 183-208
- Martin Strotz: The Buchsweiler desert near March-Holzhausen - new findings on determining the location of the former church , in: Ber. Naturf. Ges. Freiburg, 93 (2003), pp. 119-127
Unprinted sources
- D. Guldin: Holzhausen. Medieval desert. Report on geophysical prospecting , in: Ortsakten Landesdenkmalamt Baden-Württemberg (2001)
Coordinates: 48 ° 4 ′ 27.1 ″ N , 7 ° 47 ′ 26.1 ″ E