Hohler Stein (near Schambach)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Entrance portal

The Hohle Stein bei Schambach is a natural karst cave near Schambach, a district of the Upper Bavarian market town of Kipfenberg in the Eichstätt district in Bavaria .

It is a scientifically rich cave in a dolomized sponge reef of the Malm Delta in the Franconian Jura south of the Schambach valley , a side valley of the Altmühl , which flows into the main valley at Arnsberg (Eichstätt district).

location

The cave is just under two kilometers south of the village of Schambach (in the area of ​​the municipality of Böhmfeld ) and south of the Katzental dry valley , the extension of the Schambach valley, in the Herrnholz forest halfway up the slope.

description

You enter the cave through a natural archway about four by four meters. In front of the entrance, a cone of rubble from excavations flattens the original steepness to the valley floor. The "lower cave" has an area of ​​about 12 square meters and a height of eleven meters. It is connected to the “upper cave” by a corridor that goes up to the left and rises eight meters in total, another hall-shaped cave 13 meters high and about 75 square meters in area, which has a gate situation comparable to the lower cave. In total, the cave system is 35 meters long. In the upper cave - probably up to the surface of the terrain - a shaft runs steeply upwards.

The caves are listed in the Franconian Alb cave register (HFA) under I002a (lower cave) and I002b (upper cave).

Excavations

The first archaeological excavations were carried out in the cave in 1901 by Max Schlosser , curator at the Paleontological Museum in Munich . Around 1922/23 they were continued by the Munich prehistorian Ferdinand Birkner , from 1951 to 1953 by Carl Gumpert from Ansbach, who, together with the Erlangen university professor Lothar Zotz, explored the vineyard caves near Mauern in the Wellheimer dry valley , and from 1977 until the end of the 1980s by Karl Heinz Rieder , archaeologist at the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation , Ingolstadt branch. Ice Age animal bones and teeth and chert tools were found. During the excavation of KH Rieder, further stone tools for processing animal prey as well as leather and wood came to light in a central sediment zone. With the help of wedge knives , the find layer could be assigned to the Micoquien , an archaeological culture of the Neanderthals . Large blades were found in the layers above, and - again higher up - extensive teeing-off inventory came to light.

The first ascent by the Neanderthals therefore took place around 120,000 years ago, and another 80-60,000 years ago. Other finds range from iron spearheads and Roman denarii to modern times. In the Third Reich in 1938/39, Walther Krauss , mayor of Eichstätt and district leader, searched in vain for the skeleton of an "ancient German" (Rieder, anthology, p. 19f.). Like the main teacher of Schambach, Blasius Weiß , the Eichstätt university professor and "father of the Eichstätt Jura Museum", Franz Xaver Mayr , picked up stone artifacts, bones and pottery shards without systematically digging in the rubble dump in front of the cave.

literature

  • Oswald Böhme: excavations in the Hohlestein cave in the Schambachtal . In: Heimgarten , Vol. 23 (1952), No. 43.
  • Carl Gumpert: Cave excavation in the Schambach valley. In: Heimgarten , Vol. 24 (1953), No. 8.
  • Carl Gumpert: New successful excavation in the "Hohlen Stein" near Schambach. In: Heimgarten , Vol. 24 (1953), No. 44.
  • Karl Heinz Rieder: The "Hohle Stein" near Schambach . In: Collective sheet of the historical association Eichstätt , vol. 73 (1980), pp. 15-44 (there detailed bibliography).
  • Hollow stone near Schambach . In: Karl Zecherle and Toni Murböck: Nature worth seeing in the Eichstätt district . 2nd edition. District of Eichstätt, Eichstätt 1988, p. 40.
  • Karl Heinz Rieder: The artifacts of the Pleistocene cave stratigraphy in the hollow stone near Schambach district of Eichstätt . In the S. (Ed.): Stone Age cultures on the Danube and Altmühl . Ingolstadt 1989, p. 31ff. (Catalog of the exhibition of the same name in the Kavalier Hepp ( Stadtmuseum Ingolstadt ), April 11 to September 17, 1989).
  • Karl Heinz Rieder: Schambach. The hollow stone . In: Ernst Aichner (Ed.): Ingolstadt and the Upper Bavarian Danube Region . Theiss-Verlag, Stuttgart 2003, pp. 178-179, ISBN 3-8062-1716-5 (Guide to archaeological monuments in Germany; 42).
  • Karl-Heinz Rieder: The hollow stone near Schambach. Neanderthals and Ice Age hunters in the Altmühlalb (Archeology in Bavaria monographs). Pustet, Regensburg 2016, ISBN 9783791728438 .

Web links

Coordinates: 48 ° 53 ′ 19.5 ″  N , 11 ° 22 ′ 5.8 ″  E