Depot find from Oberwilflingen

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Coordinates: 48 ° 54 ′ 55 ″  N , 10 ° 25 ′ 3 ″  E

A Bronze Age depot discovered in 1932 in Oberwilflingen, today a district of Unterwilflingen , municipality of Unterschneidheim in Baden-Württemberg , is referred to as the Oberwilflingen depot find . After a property owner accidentally came across the depot while digging a trench on his estate on Römerstrasse, about 700 meters southwest of the town center, the contents were apparently completely recovered. In 1950 the finds came into the possession of the Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart .

The depot contained three bronze, partly more fragmented heel axes (further development of marginal ridge axes ) from the Central European Bronze Age, which, based on their characteristics , could be dated to the late phase of the Middle Bronze Age or to the transition to the Late Bronze Age urn field culture . The pieces, which are broken ore , were therefore in the 14th or early 13th century BC. Bury. In addition to the hatchets, the hoard also contained four "copper lumps" weighing 6 kg, the great importance of which was only recognized in the 1990s: These are fragments of at least two different so-called ox skin bars , very likely of Cypriot origin. Oxhide bars (also called keftiubars) are bars made of raw copper , the shape of which is strongly reminiscent of cattle hides and which were mostly made in Cyprus from copper, which often came from Apliki . They were between about 1600 BC. BC and approx. 1000 BC An important commodity. The localities of oxhide ingot span large parts of the Mediterranean, of Sardinia and southern France, but also the Balkans, from North Romania to Western Hungary. Oberwilflingen is the northernmost place where ox hide bars have been found so far. The evaluation of chemical elements in the four bar fragments after investigations using optical emission spectrometry in the 1990s confirmed not only that three of the four bar fragments (B1-B3) probably belonged to one bar, while the fourth (B4) certainly came from another bar also that Cyprus is very plausible as the origin of the copper: The samples showed very similar chemical compositions to already analyzed copper bars, which certainly come from Cyprus. The Oberwilflingen depot find is therefore an important evidence of the complexity and scope of the Bronze Age copper trade, especially for oxhide bars, which were accordingly sold by 1300 BC at the latest. Were also commodities well north of the Mediterranean.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Margarita Primas, Ernst Pernicka: The depot find from Oberwilflingen. New results on the circulation of metal bars , Germania 76, 1998-1, p. 25
  2. ↑ Kurt Kibbert: The axes and hatchets in central West Germany, volume 1 (= prehistoric bronze finds, section IX, volume 10). Beck, Munich 1980, p. 279 f.
  3. ↑ Margarita Primas, Ernst Pernicka: The depot find from Oberwilflingen. New results on the circulation of metal bars , Germania 76, 1998-1, p. 26 f.
  4. ↑ Oscar Paret: Find reports from Swabia. New series 11. 1938–1950. Part 1, E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1951, p. 60
  5. ↑ On ox skin bars and their distribution see Serena Sabatini: Revisiting Late Bronze Age oxhide ingots. Meanings, questions and perspectives. In: Ole Christian Aslaksen (Ed.): Local and global perspectives on mobility in the Eastern Mediterranaean (= Papers and Monographs from the Norwegian Institute at Athens, Volume 5). The Norwegian Institute at Athens, Athens 2016, ISBN 978-960-85145-5-3 , pp. 15-62.
  6. ↑ Margarita Primas, Ernst Pernicka: The depot find from Oberwilflingen. New results on the circulation of metal bars , Germania 76, 1998-1, pp. 58-62.
  7. ↑ Serena Sabatini: Revisiting Late Bronze Age oxhide ingots. Meanings, questions and perspectives. In: Ole Christian Aslaksen (Ed.): Local and global perspectives on mobility in the Eastern Mediterranaean (= Papers and Monographs from the Norwegian Institute at Athens, Volume 5). The Norwegian Institute at Athens, Athens 2016, pp. 31, 34.