High Birga

Coordinates: 47 ° 14 ′ 28.7 ″  N , 11 ° 17 ′ 49.6 ″  E

View of the Hohe Birga with Birgitz in the foreground

The Hohe Birga near Birgitz , about eight kilometers from Innsbruck, is a hilltop settlement of the Fritzens-Sanzeno culture from the 1st millennium BC. On a moraine ridge .

discovery

Exposed foundation walls of a house

Oswald Menghin was able to make out a forest hill in 1937 that would have been suitable as a Wallberg. He discovered nine man-made plateau steps, which the local residents called "giant stairs". In the following investigations it turned out that these steps date from the Middle Ages. On the southern edge of the forest hill Menghin found a stone setting, which he classified as a protective wall. This is no longer confirmed by recent research. Excavations were carried out from August to October 1938, but had to be stopped at the end of October due to the outbreak of war.

Osmund Menghin (Oswald's son) carried out successful excavation campaigns from 1949 to 1956. The excavation revealed the pits of 13 houses - one of which turned out to be a cistern during further investigations - of which three partially preserved foundation walls can still be seen today. The residential buildings (also two-storey) are of the Rhaetian type and have dry masonry , clay plaster and wood construction. Thick layers of fire indicate the violent destruction of the settlement in the late La Tène period, which is associated with the Augustan Alpine campaigns .

Finds

Paul Gleirscher examined and published the small finds of the Hohe Birga, which contain fibulae , glass bracelets, dishes, tools, bronze and iron bars, a loom as well as bone and stone finds. They were concentrated in two buildings, the others must have been systematically cleared out.

The only weapons on the settlement site were a lance tip with two iron lance shoes and a stone arrowhead, which, however, dates from the younger Stone Age or the Early Bronze Age. Foreign fibula forms and foreign ceramics suggest trade relationships and prosperity.

Association and Museum

Raeter Museum in Birgitz

In May 2001 the association "Archäotop Hohe Birga" was founded. He operates and looks after the Rätermuseum, which opened in May 2013 in the Birgitz municipal office, in which many of the found objects are exhibited.

Web links

Commons : Hohe Birga  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

• Paul Gleirscher: The small finds from the Hohe Birga near Birgitz. A contribution to the Fritzens Sanzeno culture. Reports of the Roman-Germanic Commission  68, 1987, p. 181 f.
• Paul Gleirscher: "Wallburg" or domed settlement? As evidence of “Raetian” fortifications on the Inn and Upper Etsch. Der Schlern  68, 1994, p. 138 f.
• Susanne Sievers / Otto Helmut Urban / Peter C. Ramsl: Lexicon for Celtic Archeology. A-K and L-Z ; Announcements of the prehistoric commission in the publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7001-6765-5 , p. 773 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Extract from the association register for "Archäotop Hohe Birga"
2. ↑ With combined knowledge for the Hohe Birga . In: worth knowing - magazine of the Leopold Franzens University Innsbruck . Edition June 2013. [1] (PDF; 4.0 MB)
3. ↑ Maria Leib: Räter Museum and archaeological educational trail on the Hohe Birga. On the trail of the Raetians in Birgitz. [2] (PDF; 4.3 MB)
4. ↑ Raeter Museum Birgitz. In: Museums in Tyrol. State of Tyrol, accessed on October 8, 2017 .