Stolzenburg burial ground
The burial ground of Stolzenburg (a district of Schönwalde ) is located west of Pasewalk in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district in the southeast of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . Here the A20 motorway crosses an area in which there are several prehistoric tombs.
Starting position
Immediately south of the route of the A20 are a Neolithic megalithic complex examined in 1886, a castle wall on Lake Darschkow and several Bronze Age barrows. The latter had already been removed at the end of the 19th century, with an octagonal sword from period II and a full-handled knife from period III being found. In the 1880s, a rich early Bronze Age jewelry hoard was found just 300 m south .
New dig
The excavations as part of the route investigation produced 54 archaeologically relevant structures. Some of them belong to a burial site from the Young Bronze Age, which was laid out in front of a burial mound immediately south of the route. To the north and east of it numerous pits came to light, the function of which could not be clarified beyond doubt, as they were mostly empty. Only one pit contained remains of animal bones and Neo-Bronze Age ceramic fragments, which establish the temporal reference to the graves.
The burial ground
The cemetery extends over a length of about 90 m. Nine grave finds were uncovered. Six of them, including the two houses of the dead, form a western concentration, the others were found close to each other about 30 m to the east. The area in between was largely free of findings, apart from two hearths that may be related to the burial rite. These are cremation graves, some of which can be referred to as burnt bodies, but mostly as urn graves . The former consisted of an elongated, mostly east-west facing stone pavement on which the corpse burn was spread. A 3.0 × 1.2 m plaster was well preserved, from which, in addition to corpse fire and broken pottery, the only metal find from the excavation was recovered. The undecorated, broken bronze bracelet can be dated to the beginning of the younger Bronze Age. In the case of the urn graves, the cremation was laid in an urn , which was surrounded by a protection made of flat field stones or was left unprotected. Grave goods were rare. Only in one case was an upside-down vessel exposed next to the urn.
The houses of the dead
House of the Dead 1
The most important result of the investigation was the well-preserved house of the dead 1. It was shown as a 3.9 × 2.1 m, east-west oriented field stone paving that was 0.4 m deep in the ground. At the corners and in the middle of the long sides, six post locations were clearly recognizable by a stone wreath. The posts had a diameter of about 0.4 m and in some cases reached 0.3 m into the ground. Urn graves were set into the pavement in three places, one of which had an accessory vessel. Further burials in the house of the dead, of which a roof construction could not be proven, so that a pure post construction like the Moortempel von Barger-Oosterfeld can be, prove ceramic remains from at least six vessels, as well as corpse burn concentrations on the pavement. On the pavement also found one arrowhead made of flint , which was probably given as grave goods.
House of the Dead 2
About 10 m southwest of House of the Dead 1, a second rectangular pavement, also oriented east-west, came to light, but it was more disturbed by the plow and had a residual thickness of 10 to 15 cm. This complex is also likely to be a house of the dead, of which only the two southern corner posts were detectable. In addition to the similar structure, this is supported by the fact that numerous concentrations of broken glass and corpse burns were also found here on the pavement. According to the results of the corpse fire determination, there are at least three individuals, while the recovered pottery comes from at least seven vessels.
Time position
The ceramic allows the burial site to be dated to the beginning of the Young Bronze Age (1100–900 BC). It dominates the spectrum of finds, with the remains of 17 different vessels coming from the area of the houses of the dead alone. Most of them are the conical neck vessels typical of the Young Bronze Age and terrines with a bulbous base. The determination of the remains of the corpse burn showed that most of the buried subjects were male.
Bronze Age houses of the dead in Northern Germany
Houses of the dead are a special form of Bronze Age grave construction, which has two distribution centers in northern Germany. Older Bronze Age findings are mainly known from the Niederelbe area, where hall-like buildings were erected that were later burned down, covered with stones and covered over with hills. Usually they contained the grave of a woman, more rarely the double burial of a woman and a child. The houses of the dead from the Young Bronze Age, on the other hand, are almost only occupied in southeastern Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in northeastern Brandenburg . These are probably hall-like buildings that cover rectangular stone paving with one or more burials. They show no signs of burning down or overhanging. They were apparently used as a burial place for a longer period of time, but possibly also for other cultic-religious practices. This is suggested by the findings from Glasow, only 20 km away, in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district, where an intact vessel without a corpse burn had been deposited on the stone pavement. In Stolzenburg, not only was one of the best preserved houses of the dead of that time uncovered, but for the first time two houses of the dead of this type were found on one site, increasing their total number to six in this region.
literature
- Hans-Jürgen Beier : The megalithic, submegalithic and pseudomegalithic buildings as well as the menhirs between the Baltic Sea and the Thuringian Forest (= contributions to the prehistory and early history of Central Europe. 1, ZDB -ID 916540-X ). Beier & Beran, Wilkau-Haßlau 1991, (At the same time: Halle-Wittenberg, University, habilitation paper, 1991: The megalithic, submegalithic and pseudomegalithic buildings as well as the menhirs in the five new East German federal states (formerly GDR). ).
- R. Busch: The houses of the dead. In: Günter Wegner (ed.): Life - Belief - Dying 3000 years ago. Bronze Age in Lower Saxony (= booklets accompanying exhibitions in the Prehistory Department of the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover. 7). Isensee, Oldenburg 1996, ISBN 3-89598-404-3 , pp. 419-422.
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 30 '22.4 " N , 13 ° 53' 28.3" E