Mrs. von Bäckaskog

Mrs. von Bäckaskog in the Stockholm Historical Museum.

The wife of Bäckaskog (also wife of Barum called; Swedish Bäckaskogs- or Swedish Barumskvinnan ) is a 1,939-made skeleton discovery of a Mesolithic collector that before about 9000 years ago, at the time of maglemosian culture , died.

Barum is a village ( småort ) in the Swedish municipality of Kristianstad in Skåne . The find is the oldest and one of the best preserved skeletal finds from the Stone Age in Sweden .

When Folke Hansen dug up the woman in a sitting position in a 1.2 m deep oval pit in 1939, tools for hunting and fishing were found . The archaeologists therefore assumed that they had found a man's grave. However, the analysis of the bones carried out in 1971 showed that it was a woman. This suggests that women hunted in the Stone Age, as evidently confirmed by a Gotland grave find .

The woman was 151 cm tall, slim, and around 40 to 45 years old. Their skeleton indicates the birth of a large number of children (10–12). By a carbon-14 dating was found that they v 7010-6540. BC died.

In Europe, more than 74 out of around 2,100 people are buried in a seated or semi-seated position. Another 31 graves may have contained seated burials. The burials in the seated position meant that the heaps of bones found in megalithic structures were viewed as slumped, sitting buried skeletons, as it was assumed that no population exchange took place during the Neolithic of the north and the burial customs of hunters and gatherers continued.

The grave is now in the History Museum in Stockholm. There is a memorial at the site.

The " Frau von Österöd " in Bohuslän , discovered in 1903 and dated in 2007, is an approximately 10,200 year old skeleton . The man from Koelbjerg is the oldest bog body and at the same time the oldest bone find in Denmark. It dates to the time of the Maglemose culture around 8000 BC.

literature

• Sabine Sten: Barumkvinnan: nya forskningsrön Fornvännen 95 (2000), S, [73] -87
• Mårten Stenberger : Nordic prehistory. Volume 4: Prehistory of Sweden. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1977, ISBN 3-529-01805-8 , p. 104ff.

Web links

• Mrs. von Bäckaskog - entry in the database "Fornsök" des Riksantikvarieämbetet (Swedish)
• Description and pictures (Swedish)

Coordinates: 56 ° 6 ′ 13.2 ″  N , 14 ° 21 ′ 0.3 ″  E