Göpfelstein Cave

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Göpfelstein Cave

The Göpfelstein cave above Veringenstadt. The entrance faces south and is visible from afar in a massive rock of the White Jura.

The Göpfelstein cave above Veringenstadt. The entrance faces south and is visible from afar in a massive rock of the White Jura.
Location: Swabian Alb , Germany
Height : 660  m above sea level NN
Geographic
location: 		48 ° 10 '47.1 "  N , 9 ° 12' 35"  E Coordinates: 48 ° 10 '47.1 "  N , 9 ° 12' 35"  E
Göpfelstein Cave (Baden-Württemberg)
Göpfelstein Cave
Cadastral number: 7821/2
Type: Karst cave

The Göpfelstein Cave (also Göpfelberg Cave ) is a karst cave . The former residential cave is located in the municipality of Veringenstadt in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg , Germany . The Laucherttal in the Veringenstadt area is - next to the Bad Urach area and the Blautal - one of the three most important cave areas in the Swabian Alb . This applies to the number of caves, their importance for prehistoric research and for research into geological history. The cave is also known as a hyena nest because of the location .

location

Location above the city

The Göpfelstein Cave is located on the upper southern slope of a mountain spur of the Swabian Alb, which protrudes from the west into the Lauchert valley . The narrow S-shaped river breakthrough lies in the tectonic grating zone of the Hercynian Hohenzollerngraben and the Lauchertgraben, which strikes the Rhine . By tectonic stress have crevices formed to numerous caves have widened. 34 caves are known around Veringenstadt. Two tunnels lead through the mountain spur, one directly below the cave. This road tunnel was driven into the rock in 1977 when a bypass for the federal highway 32 was built . A railway tunnel from 1907 for the Hohenzollerische Landesbahn runs just a few meters further west through the spur.

The Göpfelstein cave is at an altitude of 660  m above sea level. NN at the western exit of Veringenstadt, right above the Lauchert and the old town. The entrance faces south and is visible from afar in a massive rock of the White Jura .

The Burgweg leads up from the old town. At the top of the mountain spur, a signposted footpath branches off to the left, which leads down to the Göpfelstein cave. There is an information board at the entrance to the cave. The cave is freely accessible. Not far from the cave is the St. Nicholas Church and the ruins of Veringen Castle .

The geotope Göpfelstein Cave has been designated as a culturally and historically valuable extensive natural monument ND8437048 in the natural area of ​​the Middle Area Alb since 1971 . As an archaeological site, it is a ground monument .

description

The cave has a spacious vestibule. Behind the vestibule is the three meter wide and three meter high entrance to the actual cave, which leads into the interior of the rock on two floors. The upper, more spacious part of the cave is seven meters long, seven meters wide and five meters high. The lower part of the cave has a similar base and a height of about 1.20 meters. When the Neanderthals moved into the Göpfelstein cave, the cave only had one level. Only after the last Ice Age did a false ceiling collapse and open access to the upper cave level.

The Göpfelstein cave is the second largest stone age cave in Veringenstadt after the Nikolaus cave . It is located in a massive rock of the Weißjura ζ1 ( lying bank limestone: Kimmeridgium , ki4).

  • Entrance to the Göpfelstein cave with a view of the old town of Veringenstadt

  • lobby

  • Cave entrance

  • View into the Göpfelstein cave

  • View from the upper cave passage

  • View from the upper cave passage

  • View from the lower cave passage

Research history

  • In 1893/94 Karl Theodor Zingeler , who was head of the Princely Hohenzollern House and Domain Archives from 1891 to 1915, suspected that evidence of the Neanderthal man could be made in Hohenzollern .
  • In 1909 the first archaeological excavations took place in the Göpfelstein cave by Robert Rudolf Schmidt from the Geological Institute of the University of Tübingen . Because of the stony subsoil, however, he broke off his excavation without any findings or publication.
  • 1934 in July to August Oberpostrat a. D. Eduard Peters provided evidence of Zingeler's assumptions about the existence of Palaeolithic Paleolithic cultural remains during his test excavation .
  • In 1935, from July 25th to October 20th, Eduard Peters carried out the main excavation. Since the entire excavation documentation has been lost since 1945, the findings can only be partially reconstructed on the basis of preliminary reports. Peters apparently found no intact culture layers that could be neatly separated. Silices lay on the surface alongside cave bear bones and younger cultural remains. The excavator saw the reason for this in the fact that the overhang of the Göpfelstein had served as a shelter for flocks of sheep for centuries and that their excretions, including the upper soil layers, were used as fertilizer by the population. The sediment masses were completely slurried by Peters according to his improved slurrying process and produced over 1000, some of the tiniest silices, which prove the presence of both the Neanderthals ( Moustérien ) and the early anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens , Aurignacia ). According to Peters, clusters of finds of the Neanderthal culture were found in a depression in the cave on the right side. He assumed that the hunters of the Aurignacien preferred to use the spacious south-facing vestibule. It was not possible for Peters to clearly assign the numerous remains of the Ice Age fauna, recognizable as hunting prey, to the Neanderthal or Homo sapiens culture. The excavation was stopped after the rearmost part of the cave was only accessible by crawling and the bone-bearing clay sediments had caked to form rock-hard breccia that could not be recovered. The determination of the large mammals from the Ice Age was done by Fritz Berckhemer from the Württemberg Natural History Collection in Stuttgart, while Florian Heller from Heidelberg University worked on the remains of small mammals .
  • Towards the end of the Second World War, Peters wanted to bring his finds, which he kept in the town hall of Veringenstadt, to a safe place and brought them to the Hohenzollerisches Landeshaus in Sigmaringen . However, shortly after the French troops marched into Sigmaringen in 1945, all finds, files and excavation reports from 1941 to 1942 had disappeared. This loss brought Eduard Peters to the edge of despair.
  • In 1947 Eduard Peters carried out another inspection. The brecciated cave clay had loosened in the meantime and so an excavation with Josef Ott from Hettingen at the end of September to the beginning of October resulted in the salvage of further bone remnants from the hyena feeding site.
  • In 1950, in July or August, Ulrich Binder carried out a look-up of the debris from Peters excavations, which was apparently not very productive.
  • In 1955, Franz Werz from Veringenstadt carried out other finds, who again hid remains of the Ice Age fauna as well as Silices des Moustérien and Aurignacien.
  • In 1982 and 1983 Achim Lehmkuhl from the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart made the latest finds in the Göpfelstein cave: remains of the Pleistocene and Holocene fauna.
  • In 2004 Thomas Rathgeber from the State Museum for Natural History in Stuttgart reworked the faunas from 1934/35.

Bone finds

The analysis of the bones revealed:

Predators
  • Cave hyena ( Hyaena spelaea Cuv. ): During the last ice age (120,000 to 10,000 years ago) the Göpfelstein cave was used by the cave hyena as an eyrie for longer periods of time. This is proven by well-preserved hyena bones and gnawed and bitten remains of prey animals.
  • Cave bear ( Ursus spelaeus Bl. )
  • Wolf ( Canis lupus spelaeus Goldf. )
  • Wolverine ( Gulo borealis L. )
  • Steppeniltis ( Foetorius Eversmanni Less. )
  • Cave lion ( Felis spelaea Goldf. )
Herbivores

Proven cultural epochs

Aurignacien - flint tools, finds from the Göpfelstein and Nikolaus caves in the Veringenstadt local history museum

Settlement finds in the Göpfelstein cave show the following cultural epochs :

Mustard culture

When the Neanderthals moved into the Göpfelstein Cave, it consisted of an upper and a lower cavity, which were separated from each other by a solid ceiling. Only the lower room was accessible to humans and animals, which must have been deeply deepened on the right-hand side. This depression contained the main remains of the Moustérien culture on silices and animals, which shows that we are also dealing with an eyrie of the cave hyena. The false ceiling did not collapse until the post-ice age.
Finds are flint and bone tools from the Middle Paleolithic Age (around 80,000-35,000 BC). Cutting tools have been found in which the right edges on the back have been given so-called protective retouching so that they are firmly in the hand for use. So-called snout scrapers are plane-like devices that taper to a point in the front and that probably did a good job of processing fur. Even later, in the beginning of the Younger Paleolithic Age (30,000 BC), hunters and gatherers (groups of hunters) sought protection in the south-facing cave, conveniently located above the Lauchert.

Aurignacia culture

The modern Aurignac man has also rested in the Göpfelstein cave. However, judging from the amount of equipment and tools left behind, it appears to have only been resident briefly. Flint and bone tools ( blade culture), the so-called high scraper , is a device that is characteristic of the Aurignac culture, blade scraper and corner graver, the working edge of which is the roof-shaped cutting edge protruding above. The bone tools reveal the dexterity of this culture. For example, the fragment of a spearhead of reindeer antler , Knochenpfriemen , the fragment of a decorated by Strichgravierung awl or a bone smoother . The animal remains mainly belong to the mammoth, the cave bear, the reindeer and the wild horse.

Neolithic (Neolithic)

It was not until the late Neolithic that small hordes of cattle-breeding settlers established themselves here and there on the plateau. Some of them were members of a mixed ceramic culture of the Rössen-Großgartacher type who left a few engraved fragments in the Göpfelstein cave.

Bronze Age Culture : Early Bronze Age

Some coarse-toned sherds with polka dots, surface roughening and wide knobs probably belong to the Early Bronze Age. The sherds, which differ from those of the Late Bronze Age in terms of fire and material, come very close to the late Neolithic type of Altheim ceramics ; a culture that is also indicated by the battle-ax find in the Anna-Kapellen-Höhle . Late Bronze Age pottery and spindle whorls were also found.

Pre-Roman Iron Age : Latène culture and Hallstatt culture

In contrast to the mass of Bronze Age finds stands the small number of Early Iron Age remains. Only a few shards can possibly be determined there. For example, the fragment of a small urn from the Göpfelstein, the edge of which shows engravings on the side and on the edge , which were probably made with a fine bronze needle. It was not until the late Celtic period (i.e. in the last century BC) that the Göpfelstein cave provided an abundance of ceramic settlement finds from this period. The ceramics are now generally better fired and, according to technical aspects, can be divided into handmade and disk-made goods. The hand-made shards (mostly bowls with a drawn-in rim) usually have the well-known comb-line decoration. The potters of that time used all sorts of instruments for decorating: apart from multi-pronged tools, also two-pronged (fork-like) tools or even simple wooden sticks with a correspondingly coarse figure.

Roman culture

A coin from Emperor Antoninus Pius (138–161 AD) testifies to Roman culture .

middle Ages

After the Roman period, the Göpfelstein cave remained uninhabited for centuries, throughout the Alemannic period . During this time there was evidence of settlement in Deutstetten, approx. 1 km to the north . A large number of fragments from the Göpfelstein cave could be assigned to the Middle Ages (11th – 12th centuries). Until the 19th century, d. H. until the decline of sheep farming on the Alb, the caves were still used as cattle sheds.

Lost property

Legend of the Göpfelstein

With its rock massif and large cave, the Göpfelstein is reminiscent of a head with a large mouth . In Veringenstadt, for example, the story has been told since prehistoric times that the Göpfelstein is an unstable companion and goes to the Lauchert on Good Friday when the bells ring for the first time to quench his thirst. It is also said that in the Catholic town on Good Friday the bells fly to Rome and therefore the church bells do not ring on that day. But you never know whether one day they will return from Rome in time and the Göpfelstein will go to Lauchert to drink.

literature

Prehistoric and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern
  • Eduard Peters: Pre- and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern 1935 . In: Association for history, culture and regional studies of Hohenzollern (Hrsg.): Hohenzollerische Jahreshefte. Volume 3. 1936. pp. 332-335.
  • Eduard Peters: Prehistoric and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern 1936 . In: Association for history, culture and regional studies of Hohenzollern (Hrsg.): Hohenzollerische Jahreshefte. Volume 4. 1937. pp. 275f.
  • Eduard Peters: Prehistoric and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern 1937 . In: Association for history, culture and regional studies of Hohenzollern (Hrsg.): Hohenzollerische Jahreshefte. Volume 5. 1938. pp. 358f.
  • Eduard Peters: Pre-historical and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern 1938 . In: Association for history, culture and regional studies of Hohenzollern (Hrsg.): Hohenzollerische Jahreshefte. Volume 6. 1939. p. 186.
  • Eduard Peters: Prehistoric and early historical activity report from Hohenzollern 1939 . In: Association for history, culture and regional studies of Hohenzollern (Hrsg.): Hohenzollerische Jahreshefte. Volume 7. 1940. pp. 118f.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See weathering zone . In: Lexicon of Geosciences , Spectrum Academic Publishing House, Heidelberg 2000.
  2. ^ Karl Theodor Zingeler: The prehistoric and early historical research in Hohenzollern . In: Communications from the Association for History & Antiquity in Hohenzollern, XXVII. Born in 1893/94. M. Liehner'sche Hofbuchdruckerei, Sigmaringen 1894, MDZ digitized .
  3. ^ According to another statement, 1910
  4. ↑ a b Thomas Fink: Materials on the history of the city of Veringen. Volume 37: 1945-1949 . 2014.
  5. ↑ Franz Werz lends his own cave finds permanently . In: Schwäbische Zeitung from December 30, 2005
  6. ↑ a b See Rathgeber (2004)
  7. ↑ See Peters, Rieth (1936)
  8. ↑ See collections and museums of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)

Web links

Commons : Göpfelsteinhöhle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files