House urn
The house urn (also called the hut urn ) is a burial vessel that first appeared in the Chalcolithic Middle East under the name of the ossuary . It consists of red-brown clay or natural stone and reflects the features of different house types in the vessel body. In contrast to ash urns, this form of the house urn was used to hold unburned, excarnated skeletal parts.
House urns come in the form of round and square huts with different roof shapes. They provide insights into prehistoric construction methods, as organic building materials such as wood or reeds, which were often not preserved when buildings were found, were also imitated. Representations above the entrance (humans, animals), which were often only indicated by noses or eyes, are typical. The interior of the urn is accessed through lockable doors in the abdomen of the vessel.
House urns were common in the early Italian and Central German to the Swedish Bronze and Iron Ages ( Swedish Husurna ).
Home urn culture
The house urns give their name to a cultural stage of the early Iron Age in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Between Harz and Elbe . The urns received the remains of the pyre and unburned additions after a dead person was cremated. The house urn culture is in the course of the 6th century BC. Then replaced by the Thuringian culture and the Jastorf culture .
literature
- Emil Hoffmann: Lexicon of the Stone Age. Munich 1999.
- Wolfgang La Baume : Face urns and home urns. Archive for Anthropology, NF XXIII / 1, 1932. (Reprinted as: Message from the State Museum for Natural History and Prehistory in Danzig. Prehistoric series No. 10, undated)
- F. Oelmann: House urns or storage urns? Bonner Jahrbücher 134, Bonn 1929. S. 1 ff.
- Serena Sabatini: House urns. A European Late Bronze Age trans-cultural phenomenon. Diss. GOTARC Series B, Gothenburg archaeological theses 47, Göteborg 2007. ISBN 91-85245-33-X .