Bad Salzuflen hand ax

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Bad Salzuflen hand ax

The Bad Salzuflen hand ax is a stone tool dated 350,000 to 300,000 years ago, which was discovered in 1997 in the Lippe town of Bad Salzuflen in North Rhine-Westphalia . Therefore he is assigned to the epoch of Homo heidelbergensis . The hand ax, a reading find from the Ahmsen district , is now in the archaeological collection of the Lippe State Museum in Detmold .

Location

The tool was found in 1997 by the master bricklayer Harald Hübner while digging a construction pit for a residential house in today's Bad Salzufler district of Ahmsen , but was not examined until later by the prehistoric archaeologist Jürgen Richter (Institute for Prehistory, University of Cologne ).

description

The Middle Paleolithic hand ax has been considered the oldest tool in Westphalia , possibly in the entire state of North Rhine-Westphalia. However, its context is not secured stratigraphically , but only by comparison with Western European parallel finds. The black-brown hand ax is made of very hard silica slate (radiolarite or lydite , also called chert), is 15 cm long, 8.7 cm wide, up to 4.6 cm thick, and weighs 355 g .

The hand ax from Bad Salzuflen is an example of an "extraordinarily complex" (Jürgen Richter) hand ax from the Middle Paleolithic , which was made plane-convex (one side is plane, the other convex). It has a thin, slender top and a heavy bulbous base. The fissures in the naturally layered material, which may have developed under heat, meant that a shard on the underside had broken off. This was apparently already attached and glued by the owner. The base and top are porous, and fossil snails 1 to 2 mm in size are enclosed in the material .

Analysis of the manufacturing process

In order to understand the manufacturing process, an analysis of the work steps was carried out. 18 work steps or processing areas could be identified. The production concentrated in the first four work steps on the trimming of those edge parts on which the working edges were created later, whereas the base remained unprocessed; the natural surface was left. The fifth step was to dilute the tip part. From the beginning, the manufacturer concentrated on the machining of the later working edges, so the tool was not completely machined. So it is not a semi-finished product in which the system of various working edges or ends was initially kept open. Overall, an energy transmission tool was created. The power was transmitted from the hand, protected by the round, thick base part, through the body of the hand ax to the tip part, which takes the form of a diagonally cut pyramid , while the handling unit, i.e. the said base part, takes the form of a flat cylinder or cuboid . The interface between these two bodies was bridged by powerful thinning strokes - and only after the working edges had been completed. This may have happened as a result of some wear and this subsequent reduction in volume. Overall, then, it is a concept in which various geometric bodies were imagined and connected.

use

The hand ax was used for scraping and cutting, the latter was done with the point, which was not suitable for hard blows or stabs, but was very sharp. Other areas that were deliberately not very sharp, for example, to be able to skin the hunt without cutting, served a separating function. Overall, it is a so-called outil biface ('two-sided tool') with the functions of cutting, scraping and separating. The fact that this hand ax is a special work is shown by the fact that it has an asymmetrically converging working edge with fine, alternating retouching , comparable to another hand ax (3-P) from the site near Soucy in the Yonne valley . This piece could be dated in the interglacial MIS-9 Holstein-Interglacial and thus determined to an age of 350,000 years.

literature

  • Jürgen Richter: The millennium object: The hand ax from Bad Salzuflen , in: Ders .: Paleolithic. The path of early humans from Africa to the center of Europe , Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2018, pp. 90–95.
  • Jürgen Richter: Conscious geometric design in Homo heidelbergensis? Work step analysis on a hand ax from Bad Salzuflen (Ostwestfalen-Lippe) , in: Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 43,1 (2013) 1-18. ( online , PDF)

Remarks

  1. ↑ Fund illustration at Museum-digital.de.
  2. ↑ Jürgen Richter: Conscious geometric design in Homo heidelbergensis? Work step analysis on a hand ax from Bad Salzuflen (Ostwestfalen-Lippe) , in: Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 43,1 (2013) 1-18, p. 3
  3. ↑ Jürgen Richter: Conscious geometric design in Homo heidelbergensis? Work step analysis on a hand ax from Bad Salzuflen (Ostwestfalen-Lippe) , summary on the website of the Leibniz Research Institute for Archeology of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum, full article in: Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 43,1 (2013).
  4. ↑ Other candidates that could be about 300,000 years old, a travertine tool applies from the Kakushöhle (Kart stone) and the Rheinische Landesmuseum Bonn located handaxe of Hochdahl / Mettmann (Jürgen Richter: The Paleolithic in North Rhine-Westphalia , in: Heinz Günter Horn (Ed.): Neandertaler & Co. , von Zabern, Mainz 2006, pp. 93–116, here: p. 96 on Kartstein and p. 98 on Hochdahl).