Cortaillod culture
The Cortaillod culture is part of the Chassey-Lagozza-Cortaillod culture and one of the numerous archaeological cultures of the Neolithic in culturally fragmented Switzerland . It is named after the lakeside settlement of Cortaillod on the west bank of Lake Neuchâtel. It is mainly found in a 40–50 km wide strip from Lake Geneva to Lake Zurich as a lakeshore culture.
It follows the Néolithique ancien valasian or the La Hoguette group or the Egolzwiler culture and was partly at the same time as the Pfyner culture . In some regions, however, it has also been replaced by the latter. The classic cortaillod of central Switzerland lasted from around 4300 to 3900 BC. BC, in the west of the distribution area by the trailing Cortaillod tardif rather from 3900 to 3500 BC. The Cortaillod Port-Conty type on Lake Neuchâtel goes as far as 3,300 BC. Chr.
The food base was hunting, fishing and farming with pets (mainly cattle). A 3700 year old leavened bread was found in the lakeside settlement of Twann. The equipment inventory was varied. Hunting weapons were arrow (the arrowheads were triangular or heart-shaped with a concave base) and bows, as well as boomerang-like throwing woods. Fish hooks made from bones , harpoons made from deer antlers, remnants of net and net swimmers are evidence of fishing . The importance of agriculture is demonstrated by flint sickles with wooden shafts, wooden hackling combs for hemp and flax , grinding stones and furrowed digging sticks.
Stone tools include axes and hatchets made of rock, flint sickles, as well as ground chisels and adzes. Wooden cups, bows, flails, pickaxes, hackling combs, spoons, arrows, bowls and mallets were made from wood. Antlers (mostly throwing poles) served as raw material for axes, picks and hammers. Imported copper was processed into axes, chisels, artificial pearls and jewelry pendants.
Amphorae, baking plates, bowls and bowls with a round bottom and the buckled wall bowls typical of this culture were made of clay. Birch lamellas were glued onto some of the shiny black vessels with a tar-like adhesive as decoration.
The oldest lake settlement in Switzerland to date was discovered on Lake Zug in the 1990s, from 4350 to 4000 BC. Dated and based on the ceramic finds assigned to the Cortaillod or the even older Egolzwil culture (AiD 1999/2). One of the outstanding finds from Cham-Eslen is a perforated double ax made of serpentinite with a shaft wrapped in birch bark . Elsewhere, a relatively high number of dog bones was found , which suggests a close relationship between humans and animals at the end of the Cortaillod culture. Cortaillod and Pfyner culture were replaced by the Horgen culture .
See also
literature
- Martin Dick: Economy and Environment Cortaillod and Horgen period lakeside settlements in Zurich (Switzerland) . Results of seed analysis examinations from the prehistoric station “Mozartstrasse”, Gebr. Bornträger, 1989, ISBN 3443640443
- Jörg Schibler: The economy and environment of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC in the northern Alpine foreland based on studies of animal bones. in: Environmental Archeology 11 (1): 49-64, 2006.