Hand ax from Schnaitheim

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Hand ax from Schnaitheim

The hand ax from Schnaitheim is an approximately 80,000 to 50,000 year old hand ax that was found in 1999 on the Moldenberg in the Heidenheim district of Schnaitheim .

Find history

Marsh area on the winter dump east of Schnaitheim

The hand ax was found and picked up on June 5, 1999 by the former city ​​forester of the city of Heidenheim, Martin Schlierer, during an inspection of his former forest district. It is a single find. The field site is at a small forest hut in Gewann Winterhalde at 590  m above sea level. NHN , right next to an abandoned tree nursery and an adjacent marshland. The local conditions and circumstances of the find suggest that the artifact was not relocated and was therefore found at the original storage location. Rust-colored traces that could come from contact with a ploughshare speak against this thesis .

description

The hand ax is 15.7 inches long, 8.6 inches wide and 5.5 inches thick. The tip is round and asymmetrical, the cutting edges show minor, recent damage. At the end of the handle, cortex rounded on both sides is preserved, so a locally occurring rock from the gravel of the Urbrenz , which is deposited on the winter heap , is a possible raw material . It is coarse-grained, red-brown to brown weathered Jurassic hornstone .

Dating

The site is only 4.25 km as the crow flies from the Heidenschmiede - an abri in the rock below Hellenstein Castle - in which a similar Middle Paleolithic hand ax was found during an excavation in 1930 . Technological and typological similarities also exist with the hand axes from the Bockstein cave in the Lone Valley , so that the age classification of the hand ax from Schnaitheim also belongs to the older Moustérien ( Moustérien with Micoquien option ). It is around 80,000 to 50,000 years old.

The Schnaitheim hand ax was shown to the public for the first time in 2015 at the Museum Schloss Hellenstein . Today it is located in the State Office for Monument Preservation Baden-Württemberg in Esslingen am Neckar .

literature

  • Nicholas J. Conard : A hand ax from the winter dump near Heidenheim-Schnaitheim. In: Archaeological excavations in Baden-Württemberg 1999. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, pp. 20–21.
  • Nicholas J. Conard, Michael Bolus, Susanne C. Münzel: Middle Paleolithic land use, spatial organization and settlement intensity in the Swabian Jura, southwestern Germany. In: Quaternary International. 247, 2012, pp. 236-245.
  • Nicholas J. Conard, Michael Bolus, Ewa Dutkiewicz, Sibylle Wolf: Ice Age Archeology on the Swabian Alb. Kerns Verlag, Tübingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-935751-24-7 , pp. 64-72.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Nicholas J. Conard: A hand ax from the winter dump near Heidenheim-Schnaitheim . In: Archaeological excavations in Baden-Württemberg 1999 . Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2000, p. 20-21 .
  2. ↑ Moustérien and Micoquien. In: Jürgen Richter, Harald Floss (Ed.): Stone Artifacts - From the Old Palaeolithic to the Modern Age . 2nd Edition. Kerns Verlag, Tübingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-935751-16-2 , pp.  267-272 .
  3. ^ Heidenheimer Zeitung - Events: The Heidenschmiede am Hellenstein and the archeology of the Ice Age , accessed on November 26, 2015.

Coordinates: 48 ° 42 ′ 29 ″  N , 10 ° 10 ′ 46 ″  E