Hemmoorer bucket
As Hemmoorer bucket thin-walled, generally cylindrical metallic tubes are referred to with a rounded bottom and a Standring- or foot. In addition to specimens made of brass or bronze , a few silver buckets are also known. They all come from Roman production and were named after their place of discovery in Hemmoor in the district of Cuxhaven , where 18 of them were discovered in 1892 and 1893. So far a total of about 150 Hemmoorer buckets have been found. Some Hemmoorer buckets with a circumferential relief - frieze decorated.
Dating and function
The sites are Germanic burial grounds that unearthed a large number of Roman metal objects as well as wooden and ceramic vessels. The buckets were deposited in the 2nd half of the 2nd century to the middle of the 3rd century . The buckets were used as urns to absorb the corpse burn and were buried. Their actual function was probably sumptuous household equipment or kitchen inventory. The relief on the Simpelveld sarcophagus from the south of the province of Limburg ( Netherlands ) in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden , Leiden provides an indication of this . It shows two of the buckets along with other equipment. The matron stone from Vettweiß (Kr. Düren), which was donated to the Vesuvian matrons by M. Aurelius Pacatus, shows a bucket filled with fruit. Heinrich Willers wrote in 1907 that the vessels were probably imported from Capua . From around 150 AD they are said to have been made with domestic calamine .
Some Hemmoorer buckets have at the top of a 5 to 7 cm wide circumferential relief frieze of ornaments on Samian - ceramics recalls. The shape and the decorations seem from the 2nd half of the 8th century BC. BC to the 4th century in northern Italy ( Bologna and Este) made bronze situla vessels. The decorations rarely have silver inlays and enamel inlays , which increases their character as a magnificent vessel. Almost all buckets have handles or tabs for handles.
Manufacturing
The Hemmoorer buckets were mostly made of thin sheet brass with a wall thickness of only 0.4 to 1.0 mm. For a long time there was speculation among experts about the production method of the brass buckets . So the casting in the lost form with subsequent overturning or driving was discussed. In the end, studies by the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences in the mechanical engineering department showed that the buckets were made in a hardwood mold using the metal spinning process. The production was carried out with a very high level of manufacturing skill. It is noteworthy that the original weight of the buckets was almost exactly the multiple of a Roman ounce at 27.3 g each.
The bronze buckets were probably made using a casting in the lost form . The resulting, initially bottomless, blank was then reworked on the lathe . Above all, the wall thickness was reduced and the surface was re-smoothed. In the last step, the floor and the stand were fitted and hammered into place. Finally the bucket was polished. Bell-shaped buckets were apparently almost exclusively cast from bronze.
Despite a similar series production of these buckets, no specimens have been found that are identical in size, shape and decoration. Many of these bucket blanks were probably made in the same molds and, during their further processing, individualized with decorations, attached feet, and their size.
Because of the gallow deposits around the Gressenicher Höhe in the Mausbach / Hastenrath / Hamich triangle in the Eschweiler-Stolberg area in the western Rhineland , this area is assumed to be the central production area, which is why the brass vessels are sometimes also referred to as Gressenich buckets . The metallurgist of the French national museums, Jean R. Maréchal, wrote in 1962 that zinc is generally not found in prehistoric copper and bronze objects. However, there are a few exceptions where zinc and copper ore have appeared since the Iron Age. He contradicts the assumptions of H. Willers and goes on to say that this mining was more used for calamine blocks and for building purposes, but not for zinc utilization. Due to the lack of explanations for the origin of a brass industry there, the zinc deposits in north-east France, the Rhenish slate mountains or the Harz Mountains etc. have to be taken into account. The main area of distribution of these vessels lies in the vicinity of the latter.
In addition, Simpelveld and Vettweiß are on an axis, the center of which is almost exactly the place Gressenich. Thus, at least through the Vettweißer Stein, a certain reference is made. At the place mentioned, the up to five meter high layers of slag, which contained all kinds of Roman utensils such as hairpins , coins, etc., were further recycled in the 19th century .
Other materials
Of silver only a few have been known. This is probably a special form of pomp, which was probably made of bronze, similar to buckets. There are also some comparable pieces of glass.
Distribution and regional burial custom
In Lower Saxony and parts of northern Germany , the buckets were used as urns , for example at Gessel in a Germanic burial ground from the Roman Empire of the 2nd and 3rd centuries or at the bronze bucket from Sasendorf . They are also known from Scandinavia , Mecklenburg , Poland, the Ukraine , the Czech Republic and France as additions to body graves, and from settlements in the Netherlands.
Research history
In 1892, when the limestone quarries were expanded in Hemmoor, eleven Roman brass buckets, two wooden buckets and a funnel-shaped clay pot were discovered. A year later, seven more similar brass buckets, a bronze kettle and several clay pots were found just a few meters from the first site. The buckets found in Hemmoor give the entire group of finds their name. After they were found, the buckets from Hemmoor were sold to what was then the Provincial Museum (today Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover ). In 1901 they were defined as an independent type by Heinrich Willers as part of a study on vascular anatomy . Some of the buckets were presented again by Hans Hahne , who was the first to recognize the production method of the brass specimens. The typology of the Hemmoorer buckets that is generally valid today goes back to Hans Jürgen Eggers. In his 1951 work on imports into free Germania, he distinguished 15 forms (Eggers type 52-66).
literature
- Michael Erdrich: About the brass buckets of the Hemmoorer type: distribution, dating and production. In: Rom an der Niederelbe catalog for the exhibition, Neumünster 1995, pp. 71–80, ISBN 3-529-01836-8 .
- Heinrich Willers: The Roman bronze buckets from Hemmoor Hannover / Leipzig 1901.
- Hans Jürgen Eggers : The Roman import in free Germania In: Atlas der Urgeschichte 1 Hamburg 1951.
- Donald B. Harden et al. (Ed.): Glass of the Caesars exhibition catalog Cologne 1988, p. 127. (Glaseimer)
Individual evidence
Web links
- www.archaeologischer.de Hemmoorer Eimer ( Memento from February 5, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) (copy in the Internet Archive)
- New finds from Lower Saxony ( Memento from November 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )