Sopron-Várhely burial ground

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barrow on Várhely / Burgstall

The Sopron-Várhely burial ground is a fortified hilltop settlement with a burial mound from Hallstatt (around 800 to 475 BC) to the Late Latène period (190 BC to the birth of Christ) in the district of Várhely (castle stables) near Brennbergbánya in the southeast the Hungarian city of Sopron (dt. Ödenburg, County Győr-Moson-Sopron ). The Burgstallberg is an eastern branch of the Alpine ridge and reaches a height of 483 above sea level. The Rosalien and Leithagebirge separate it from the Vienna Basin. The site is known because of the burial mound and the figuratively decorated Hallstatt urns .

Excavation history and settlement

Open-air reconstruction of a grave from the Burgstall
Reconstruction of some urns and grave goods

As early as the end of the 19th century, Lajos Bella explored all the hilltop settlements around Sopron. He discovered 136 large and 60 smaller barrows on Burgstallberg . Around 1970 Gyula Szádeczky-Kardos found only 159 of them during new surveying and mapping work. From 1971 to 1978 systematic excavations took place under the direction of Erzsébet Patek.

Eight cuts through the ramparts and small areas in the interior resulted in settlement remains from the Hallstatt and late Latène periods. The tumuli had been created in a north-south length of around 1000 m along a road that led to the main gate on the southwest side of the wall. Some of them are located directly on and between the pre-fortifications. This indicates that the tombs are older than the part of the fortifications that can be proven to come from the late Latène. The fortified area had a north-south extension of around 1250 m and a maximum width of 1000 m. A second large gate was located on the west side of the wall.

The ten grave sites examined more closely during this excavation resulted in a chronological sequence of occupancy, which can be read from the changed construction of the graves. Grave 215 has a subsequent burial from the Hallstatt D1 period (650 to 475 BC) and, together with the finds in house 9 of the settlement, belongs to the same time horizon as the oldest traces of settlement from the Sopron-Krautacker cemetery .

The complex was built in various successive epochs, from the Urnfields (around 1300 to 800 BC) through the Hallstatt to the late Latène period. This proves the important position of the site in the region of the eastern edge of the Alps, especially from the 8th to the 6th century BC. The fortified Burgstallberg experienced a second boom from the 2nd to the 1st century BC. When a “ murus gallicus ” -like main wall made of wooden coffers with stone front walls was built for the inner fortifications and the gate systems .

Most of the found objects are kept in the Sopron Museum ( Soproni Múzeum ), where the open-air reconstruction of a grave from Burgstallberg is exhibited. The found objects in the Natural History Museum Vienna served Alexandrine Eibner-Persey as the basis of her dissertation, in which she described the finds and summarized the research history.

See also

literature

  • Alexandrine Eibner-Persey: Hallstatt-time burial mounds of Sopron (Ödenburg). The finds from the excavations 1890–92 in the prehistoric department of the Natural History Museum in Vienna and in the Burgenland State Museum in Eisenstadt. In: Scientific work from Burgenland . No. 62, Eisenstadt 1980.
  • Erzsébet Patek: New investigations on the castle stables near Sopron. In: Report of the Roman-Germanic Commission. No. 63, 1982, pp. 105-177.
  • Erzsébet Patek: West Hungary in the Hallstatt period. VCH Verlag, Weinheim, 1993, ISBN 978-3-5271-7783-7 .
  • Erzsébet Jerem: Sopron-Várhely (Burgstall), Hungary. In: Susanne Sievers , Otto H. Urban , Peter C. Ramsl (Hrsg.): Lexicon for Celtic Archeology. L-Z. In: Communications from the Prehistoric Commission. Volume 73. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7001-6765-5 , pp. 1748–1750.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Erzsébet Patek: New investigations on the castle stables near Sopron. Pp. 105-106.
  2. ↑ Site plan of the complex with a photo of the ramparts in Sievers / Urban / Ramsl: Lexicon of Celtic Archeology. P. 1749.
  3. ↑ Alexandrine Eibner-Persey: Hallstatt Age burial mounds of Sopron (Ödenburg).

Coordinates: 47 ° 39 ′ 45.4 "  N , 16 ° 31 ′ 48.7"  E