Women's graves from Ilse

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location

The Iron Age women's graves in Ilse , a district of Petershagen on the central Weser in East Westphalia , are located in the area where around 550 BC Chr. Common Nienburger culture .

Typical of this culture are the cremation of corpses and the dumping of the burned bones in urns . At best, a small vessel was added to the corpse burn, but jewelry or tools are rare.

Nienburger cup

Things are different on the Ilse cemetery, which was discovered in 1998. Here the dead were buried in body graves 1.0–1.5 m deep. The mostly west-east oriented corpse shadows or bones lie on the bottom, where sometimes traces of a death bed or a coffin can be found. Mainly at the head and foot end, here and there, greenish bronze parts of the costume appear.

Two of the first 15 and later 24 uncovered graves were found empty. These can represent men's graves. For the rest of the time, we are dealing with 12 adult women and one young girl in terms of costumes and height. The excavators gave them the women's names: Alina, Christa, Claudia, Daniela, Diana, Frieda, Hanna, Laura, Martina, Ophelia, Regina, Sarah and Wilhelmina.

With the exception of Wilhelmina, who was discovered during construction work and whose furnishings may be incomplete, all wore at least a pair of ribbon rings on their temples. The spirals made of double bronze wire were attached to the headgear, which was not preserved , together with simple, ring-shaped (Claudia) or double, S-shaped wire spirals as well as glass (Claudia) or amber beads (Martina) or toilet utensils (Daniela). The headgear was attached to the hair with one (Christa) or two (Diana and Laura) short needles. There were also needles that Daniela, Diana, Laura and Martina used to close their robes or shawls on their chests. Diana and Martina had a small, simple bronze ring at belt height. The young girl (Laura) had a similar ring on her left wrist. Diana, Ophelia, Sarah and Wilhelmina wore arm rings on their forearms. Neck rings were found on Diana and Sarah. With the exception of Laura and Frieda, the women had bronze rings with an inner diameter of around 9 cm on both ankles. The anklets were (except for Ophelia) simple, undecorated and originally probably covered with fabric. While most of them are massive and relatively thin (1 to 1.5 cm thick), Claudia, Regina and Sarah's ankle rings were cast hollow to achieve a thickness of 2 to 3.5 cm. Martina was the only one wearing two foot rings on her left lower leg. Claudia, Frieda and Hanna were given one or two vessels near their heads.

The Iron Age body graves of Ilse are unique in the North German fire burial zone. Their costumes are occasionally burnt and fragmented in cremation graves or unburned in hoard finds in central and north- eastern Germany. However, they are typical for the Upper Rhine region, especially in connection with body graves. Corresponding finds are known from Alsace , North Baden and Switzerland. It is dated to the late Hallstatt period , most likely to the turn of Hallstatt Dl to Hallstatt D2, i.e. to the middle of the 6th century BC. Chr.

The women from Ilse do not belong to those "strange women" who can be recognized from time to time by the fact that their furnishings contain strange parts. Here it is not the individual woman who is foreign, but the entire group. The women not only wear their Upper Rhine costume, they were also buried in the Upper Rhine style. So we are dealing with immigration into a kind of ghetto and with a conscious cultural segregation, as is typical for missions. Such cases are already known from the Neolithic , when a ghetto of the distant Danubian Baden culture was found in the Swiss settlement Arbon-Bleiche of the Pfyn culture .

The teeth of five of the women were examined using strontium isotope analysis. The analyzes showed that two of the five women grew up here. Andrea, Sarah and Ophelia, on the other hand, were strangers in the area. This could mean that we have several generations ahead of us: Andrea, Sarah and Ophelia came to the Weser as adults, while Alina and Claudia were already born here.

This does not answer the question of the whereabouts of the men's graves, combined with that of the location of the settlement, which may have been differentiated from the residential areas of the Nienburg culture. The vessels in three graves and the needles with bowl heads, which are largely absent in the Upper Rhine area, show that they have also opened up to local culture.

literature

  • Daniel Bérenger: llse - An Upper Rhine 'Ghetto' of the Early Iron Age on the Middle Weser? In: Location North Rhine-Westphalia Volume 5 million years of history. von Zabern, Mainz 2000, ISBN 3-8053-2672-6 .

Web links

Coordinates: 52 ° 23 '56 "  N , 9 ° 2' 29.4"  E