Stool grave

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Drawing of a stool burial of the Capsien culture
A stool grave with four human skeletons in German Order Museum of Bad Mergentheim , about 2500 BC
Stool grave from the Hallstatt period , Mitterkirchen / Upper Austria

With stool grave , squat grave or stool burial (short form: "stool" ( English Crouched burial )) are body burials in which the corpse was laid down with bent arms and legs. There are side stools, stools in the prone position and stools in the supine position.

Archaeological record

At the - z. B. archaeological - description of stool burials, the orientation of the deceased in the cardinal points, his line of sight, the position of the pelvis and shoulder blades (whether on the back or the side) and the side on which the extremities are taken into account. Furthermore, the degree of angling in each joint is part of the documentation, as z. B. extreme angling may indicate a former wrapping of the corpse.

Stone Age, Copper Age and Bronze Age

Stool graves are among the oldest known forms of burial . The oldest graves found so far date back to the Younger Paleolithic . In Europe, this form of burial was the most common from the early Neolithic (approx. 5600 to 2200 BC) until the early Bronze Age . In some cultures, v. a. of the late Copper Age , the dead were laid down in a gender-specific position, separated according to cardinal points and lateral position. So are z. B. the female skeletons of the Bell Beaker Culture with extremities crouched to the right, facing south and the male dead on the left, facing north. Simultaneous cultures can also differ in the way in which the dead are laid down.

Primitive peoples

The squat burial is still practiced today , for example among indigenous peoples . Whether the reasons for this are only to be found in the obvious savings in work or also in abstract ideas (imitation of the sleeping position, “tying up” for fear of the return of the dead) remains the subject of individual research.

literature

  • Hans Bonnet: Stool Burial . In: Ders .: Lexicon of Egyptian Religious History . Nikol Verlag, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-937872-08-6 , pp. 305f.
  • Brockhaus : stool grave . Volume 8, Wiesbaden 1969, page 574.