Gold find from Cottbus
The Cottbus gold find is an important gold treasure trove from the Migration Period in Germany. It was discovered on January 17th, 1934 in Ströbitz near Cottbus and comprises four arm rings and a neck ring with a total weight of 856 g fine gold .
description
Three arm rings are simple, not decorated and have thickened ends in the shape of a stamp. The fourth arm ring is twisted twice and richly decorated with punched ornaments on the face side. This is a typical representative of the snakehead arm rings , which are found more frequently in southern Sweden. Due to the complete stylization of the animal heads at the ends, it is typologically very close to a find in Flurstedt .
The double folded neck ring is made of thick gold wire and shows a pear-shaped hooking of the ends.
The finds are to be assigned to the 4th century AD.
Site and history of discovery
The site was on the edge of an elongated sand dune on the old parade ground, now the former airfield. This rose up to three meters high from a wide valley sand plain and was popularly known at the time as the Feldherrenhügel . In the period before the First World War, military exercises were conducted from there and military parades were held .
The gold treasure was found at a depth of about 35 cm when removing this dune, lying on top of one another, free in the ground. The finder, a worker, first thought of brass rings and broke the snakehead arm ring into two pieces to examine the material. In the evening he brought the find to the chemist Oskar Lecher , who recognized the importance and secured it.
On January 20, 1934, the site was inspected on behalf of Wilhelm Unverzagt by the district caretakers Johannes Pätzold and Otto Doppelfeld as well as Mr. Karl-Heinrich Marschalleck and the finder of the treasure. It was found that the rings had been lying freely in the ground without an accompanying find, so it must have been a deposit . A re-excavation carried out promptly showed no traces of a disturbance in the completely stone- and gravel-free soil.
When the dune was further removed, large hearth pits with Slavic sherds were discovered, but a connection to the gold discovery could not be established.
Whereabouts
The Cottbus gold find was acquired by the State Museum for Prehistory and Early History in Berlin and was exhibited there in Hall 20 (Gold Hall) next to the Eberswalder gold treasure .
The gold treasure was hidden in Russian special depots for 60 years, and in 2007 it was shown to the public again in the German-Russian joint exhibition “Merovingian Age - Europe without Borders”.
Individual evidence
- ^ Photo archive Marburg: Bangles from the Cottbus gold find (1934). 1939, Retrieved November 24, 2017 .
- ↑ Martin Jahn: The Germanic gold find from Cottbus. In: News sheet for German prehistoric times. Volume 10, 1934, ISSN 0259-7829 , pp. 208-209.
- ^ Gudrun Meyer: looted art - objects of desire. In: Focus Online. March 5, 2007. Retrieved November 25, 2017 .