Kelsterbach terrace

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The slope of the Kelsterbacher Terrasse seen from the Schwanheim Forest , view from the north. In the foreground a part of the long aisle running across the site

The Kelsterbacher Terrace is in the Old and Middle pliocene created, today 12 to 17 meters high and eight-kilometer-long river terrace in the Lower Main level south of Frankfurt . The terrace is an ice-age remnant of the former river bed of today's river Main . The mostly moderately steep slope of the terrace from south to north is the only step in the terrain in the Frankfurt city forest . Several barrows and archaeological finds on site testify to the human use of the Kelsterbach terrace in the Stone Age and Bronze Age to the Iron Age . The oldest known road connection in Frankfurt runs along the upper edge of the terrace, the border aisle .

location

The western end of the Kelsterbacher Terrasse is on the left bank of the Main in the northern urban area of Kelsterbach in the Groß-Gerau district . From there, the terrace runs in a west-east direction to the Frankfurt area in the south of today's Schwanheim and Sachsenhausen districts . It stretches at altitudes of 108 to 120 meters above sea ​​level between the Schwanheimer Wald in the north and the Unterwald in the south through the southwestern part of the Frankfurt city forest. The Kelsterbach terrace is the boundary between the younger Main river bed in the north and older deposit areas.

Partly in the literature and the subsequent southward to the ground level, mostly wooded plain of the former is wild ban Dreieich and the monk break the landscape area Kelsterbacher Terrace counted. The plain connecting to the terrace to the north between Sachsenhäuser Berg and Flörsheim with the Main floodplain formed in the Holocene and the canalised course of the Main is known as the Flörsheim-Griesheimer Main valley .

The Kelsterbach Terrace is wooded throughout its entire length; the most common tree species in the mixed forest there are oaks ( Quercus ), red beeches ( Fagus sylvatica ) and Scots pine ( Pinus sylvestris ). The latter were settled in the Frankfurt city forest from the 15th century through targeted, extensive sowing ("Nürnberger Dannensäer") . While the vegetation on the slope and at the foot of the terrace has a sparse layer of bushes and herbs, the forest along the upper edge of the step in the Frankfurt city area has dense undergrowth with shrubs and young trees over long distances .

Geology and topography

Ice-age sandstone boulder from the slope of the terrace, exhibit at the Schwanheim Local History Museum
Infostele of the Frankfurt green belt on the history of the Kelsterbach terrace

The Kelsterbacher Terrasse belongs to the area of ​​the Upper Rhine Rift Valley , formed in the Tertiary Age , and its system of ditches and thresholds. During the Quaternary , the subsidence of the Rhine-Main lowlands continued; the Ur-Main gradually filled the low-lying area with gravel and sand during the cold ages. During warm periods, several terrace-like incisions were created in this gravel plain due to soil erosion . Seven such terraced landscapes are known in the Rhine-Main lowlands.

The core of the Kelsterbach terrace, which consists of gravel and sand, has a layer of loam and clay soil above it . A special feature of the Kelsterbach terrace is its layer of drift sand . The blown sand, which has layers up to ten meters thick, formed hills and dunes as well as flattened areas. Such sand drifts occur on the Main only in its lowlands and in higher lying areas to the left of the Main bank. Typical locations of these sand drifts in the Frankfurt urban area are, in addition to the Kelsterbach terrace, the Schwanheimer dune northwest of it and the two inland dunes, Tannenkopf and Pfingstberg , located south of the populated area of ​​Schwanheim . The surface of the Kelsterbach terrace consists of a 30 to 60 cm thick mixture of sand, loam or clay as well as pumice tuff . The deposits of tuff on the terrace come from the eruption of an Eifel volcano around 10.930 BC. BC, whose caldera formed the Laacher See .

Due to the material backfill described, the terrace has a significantly lower groundwater level than the area immediately north of it. While the groundwater in the lowlands of the Frankfurt city forest is just below the surface of the earth, it lies under the Kelsterbach terrace at depths of up to 14 meters.

In the winter of 1969/1970, a small-sized boulder made of red Main sandstone was discovered in the floor of the terrace slope . The stone comes from the Spessart and was transported by the ice masses of one of the cold ages through the valley of the Ur-Main to the Kelsterbach terrace. This boulder is exhibited today in the courtyard of the Schwanheim Local History Museum.

Human settlement and usage history

Information board of the historical Schwanheim hiking trail at the foot of the terrace on the history of human settlement

Finds of stone age tools

The Kelsterbach Terrace shows traces of human use since the Paleolithic . Since the late 1960s, several stone tools have been found on site, the age of which is given as 40,000 to 50,000 years. This includes several tools of chert and three arrowheads from flint . The first two Stone Age arrowheads are surface finds from 1966. The third specimen, 5.3 centimeters long and with clear traces of processing ( retouching ), was excavated in 1969. According to a report by the Frankfurt Museum of Prehistory and Early History (now the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum ), it is the first reliably identified find from the Paleolithic in the Frankfurt city area. The tool is attributed to the Neanderthals from the period of the Moustérien . A stone ax and a stone mortar discovered in 1968 as a surface find are dated to the Neolithic Age , to the epoch of ribbon ceramics between 2900 and 2500 BC. Dated. The aforementioned finds are now in the Schwanheim Local History Museum.

Traces of settlement and burial mounds from the Bronze Age

Several Bronze Age finds were also made on the Kelsterbach terrace, for example on the remains of the historical fortress of the Schwedenschanze in Kelsterbach and in 1989 during the construction of Bundesstraße 40 in the Schwanheim Forest . In April 1972, when the terrace in Kelsterbach was pierced, extensive finds of pottery shards, animal bones, tools and flint were made in rubbish pits from the Middle Bronze Age (14th to 13th centuries BC). The finds also include two artistic sculptures made of clay that are interpreted as depictions of cattle. Already in 1964 the construction of sports facilities in Kelsterbach a Radnadel was made of bronze was found that as grave goods applies. These finds as well as the post holes and fireplaces of several round houses that were also found on site indicate a larger settlement there at this time. The Bronze Age traces of settlement found a few hundred meters further north on an altar of the Main, also on the Rohsee in the 1970s, are interpreted as a branch settlement of this branch of the Bronze Age on the Kelsterbacher Terrasse . This includes a construction made of tree trunks about one meter deep, which is interpreted by local researchers from Schwanheim as a port, bank reinforcement or pier on the river bank from that time.

Barrow from the Hallstatt period near Stockdorf in Upper Bavaria; in disposition and vegetation very similar to the barrows on the Kelsterbach terrace

In the Frankfurt city forest, between the city limits of Kelsterbach in the west and that of Offenbach in the east, there are a total of nine known groups of various sizes with a total of 370 burial mounds from the era from the Older Bronze Age to the Younger Iron Age ; four groups of graves and some single mounds lie on the upper edge of the Kelsterbach terrace. Since the mounds were often used for several burials, some of which were carried out at longer intervals, they vary greatly in height and size due to the number of graves they contain. A small number of hills have heights between 1.6 and 2.0 meters, the others are mostly much flatter. Many of the flatter burial mounds can only be identified as such with difficulty due to their current dense vegetation, flattening through soil erosion , their proximity to more recent artifacts (see the following section on modern border fortifications) and damage.

The tumulus groups along the Kelsterbach terrace are approximately the same distance from one another of around 1.5 kilometers. To distinguish them, archaeologists and local researchers named them after the modern forest path and field names of the places where they were found. The group of barrows furthest to the west - near today's city limits to Kelsterbach, on the Lichtetalschneise, called Lichte-Tal-Gruppe - is also the smallest on the terrace with 12 hills. Parts of it were destroyed by bombs in World War II (see below, article section Human interference in the 19th and 20th centuries ). The following three larger groups of grave hills are as Hinkelstein group summarized: East adjacent, near the maple swath is the Tannacker group with 38 grave hills. Excavations there in the late 19th century unearthed fragments of ceramics from the Hallstatt period . Red sandstone fixtures were found in the excavated hills . This is followed to the east by the 67 also from around 700–450 BC. The most extensive Wartweg group on the former Wartweg (also Waadtweg ) called the Unterschweinstiegschneise and the Benzengrund group with 20 hills. The groups of hills on the terrace, laid out along a prehistoric long-distance path (today border corridor; see below), are each located near dry valleys (field name Lichtes Tal ), traces of earlier water outflows from the terrain into the Main lowlands. These locations were probably chosen to facilitate the ascent and descent on the terrace slope from the settlements in the lowlands. All barrows on the Kelsterbacher Terrasse are protected ground monuments according to the Hessian Monument Protection Act .

Historic trade route Grenzschneise

One of several historical boundary stones on the border aisle along the upper edge of the Kelsterbacher Terrasse, here marked SF for the city ​​of Frankfurt and numbered

On the northern edge of the terrace, the border aisle runs along its upper edge . Finds from the Neolithic along the aisle prove its age and the long duration of its use by humans. According to the Forestry Office of the City of Frankfurt, the Grenzschneise is the oldest known path in the city. The duration of their use as a trade route is estimated at over 7,000 years. The use of the route as a section of an old road from Mainz via Hanau to Aschaffenburg has been documented in writing since the early Middle Ages . Earlier names of the Grenzschneise were Schnede (Schneise), Mark ( early New High German for border, also territory ) and Loog (also an early New High German word for border ) or Loogweg or Schwanheimer Loog . Another historical name for the path was Bischofsweg - a name that has been preserved to the present day for a section of this old road further east in the Frankfurt district of Sachsenhausen .

There are several historical boundary stones on the forest path along the Kelsterbacher Terrasse, which has remained unpaved to this day . The stoning, that is, the definition of rulership boundaries by means of hewn, marked stones, has been handed down for the Frankfurt city forest since early modern times . The oldest boundary books for the forest are known from the early 16th century. The stones along the border aisle bearing the carved letters date from the beginning of the 19th century. The markings on the north side are S (Schwanheim) and HN ( Duchy of Nassau ), the mark on the south side SF means City of Frankfurt (→ Free City of Frankfurt ) . Until Schwanheim was incorporated into Frankfurt in 1928, the aisle marked the border between the Frankfurt Unterwald in the south and the Schwanheim community forest to the north. A single three-man stone , which also marked the border to the Grand Duchy of Hesse , has been missing since construction work on site in 1972. At its southern edge, the border aisle is accompanied by a border wall with a ditch, a second, older ditch, 50 meters further south, indicates a border shift. The historic Schwanheim hiking trail and a south-western section of the Frankfurt Green Belt circular hiking trail run along the border aisle.

Human interventions in the 19th and 20th centuries

An approximately 1.5 kilometer long section of the Kelsterbacher Terrasse has a significantly steeper slope than the rest of the terrain due to human influence. There, south of the former village of Schwanheim, on a parcel called Hölle or Helle (von Halde ), gravel and sand were extracted from 1881 as backfill material for the construction of Frankfurt Central Station . During this encroachment on a primeval landscape several million years old, large boulders were discovered that the glaciers of the cold ages had deposited there. At least twelve of the Bronze Age barrows located there fell victim to the dismantling work. In the field names hell has up to the present of the immediately leading along the bottom of the slope Höllenweg out.

During the Second World War, a military unit of the Wehrmacht stationed in the Frankfurt city forest built an underground bunker into the slope of the Kelsterbach terrace on the Unterschweinstieg aisle . The entrance to the bunker was filled with earth and filled in in the 1980s and is no longer visible in the area today. The Kelsterbach terrace was also hit several times by aerial bombs during the Allied area bombing of Frankfurt during the Second World War . These were non-targeted emergency drops by Allied bomber planes that had been hit by anti-aircraft projectiles from the German anti-aircraft guns . Part of the Bronze Age burial mounds of the Lichte Valley Group was destroyed in the process; the bomb craters are still clearly recognizable in the area on and on the terrace.

At the foot of the Kelsterbacher Terrasse, immediately east of Schwanheimer Bahnstrasse , is the shooting range of a local hunting club, which uses the terrain as a natural bullet trap . At the relevant stage of the Grenzweg at the upper edge of the terrace immediately east of Schwanheimer Bahnstrasse , the area serving as a bullet trap is cordoned off by fences and appropriate warning signs.

Transport links

A western section of the terrace in Kelsterbach, east of the Schwedenschanze . North view

The Kelsterbacher Terrasse can only be reached directly in two places on roads open to road traffic: at its western end in the town of Kelsterbach, in the north of the urban area, a section of the Kirschenallee street , on which the Schwedenschanze is also located, runs along the upper edge of the terrace . To the south of Frankfurt-Schwanheim, the Schwanheimer Bahnstrasse leads from the north to the Kelsterbacher Terrasse; The Schwanheimer Wald bus stop operated by the Frankfurt transport company VgF is in the immediate vicinity of the destination . There is a public car park on Schwanheimer Bahnstrasse for motorized individual traffic . The closest connection to the VgF tram is the Waldfriedhof Goldstein stop on line 12. From there, the distance to the terrace to the south is about one kilometer via the Unterschweinstiegschneise forest path . This leads to the local border corridor . Most of the eight kilometer long Kelsterbach terrace can only be reached directly on foot, on horseback and by bike.

literature

  • Josef Henrich (ed.), Various authors: Suenheim - Sweinheim - Schwanheim . Publisher Franz Jos. Henrich KG, Frankfurt am Main 1971
  • Various authors: Nature on the doorstep - urban nature in Frankfurt am Main . Kleine Senckenberg series 50, E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung (Nägele and Obermiller), Stuttgart 2009. ISBN 978-3-510-61393-9
  • City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (Hrsg.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim - Wanderweg zur Schwanheimer history and prehistory . 3rd (corrected) edition, Frankfurt am Main 2002

Web links

Commons : Kelsterbacher Terrasse  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Kleine Senckenberg series 50, p. 85 ff.
  2. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, Chapter Tannenkopf, p. 13
  3. ↑ Kleine Senckenberg-Reihe 50, p. 86
  4. ↑ Kleine Senckenberg-Reihe 50, p. 87
  5. ↑ a b Gerd-Peter Kossler (ed.) And other authors: Forest in the south of Frankfurt: Stadtwald, Gravenbruch, Mönchbruch, S. 60. Self-published, Frankfurt am Main 1991. ISBN 3-9800853-2-5
  6. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, chapter steep slope, p. 28 f.
  7. ↑ Norbert Müller: Our home in the Stone Age, in: Suenheim - Sweinheim - Schwanheim, pp. 14-16
  8. ↑ a b c d City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, chapter Grenzschneise and boundary stones, p. 36 ff.
  9. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, chapter Kelsterbacher Terrasse, p. 39 f.
  10. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, Chapter Riedwiese, p. 41
  11. ↑ Information board on the historic Schwanheim hiking trail on site.
  12. ↑ a b c d Ingrid R. Drafta: Schwanheimer Wald, in: Kreuz und quer durch den Frankfurter GrünGürtel, p. 86 ff. CoCon-Verlag, Hanau 1996. ISBN 3-928100-42-4
  13. ↑ a b City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, Chapter Lichte-Tal-Schneise, p. 35
  14. ↑ a b City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (Ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, Chapter Tumulus, p. 21 ff.
  15. ↑ a b c Ulrich Fischer: The barrows in the Schwanheim forest, in: Suenheim - Sweinheim - Schwanheim, pp. 17-20
  16. ^ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): From Altheeg to Vierherrnstein - names in the Frankfurt city forest . Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald , Kreisverband Frankfurt eV, 1988, p. 9
  17. ^ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Vom Altheeg zum Vierherrnstein - names in the Frankfurter Stadtwald, p. 13
  18. ↑ a b Kelsterbacher Terrasse at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the city of Frankfurt am Main
  19. ^ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Vom Altheeg zum Vierherrnstein - names in the Frankfurter Stadtwald, p. 26
  20. ↑ a b c Environment Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main (ed.): GrünGürtel-Freizeitkarte, 7th edition, 2011
  21. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, Chapter Tumulus, p. 22
  22. ↑ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): Historischer Wanderweg Schwanheim, chapter steep slope, p. 27
  23. ^ City of Frankfurt am Main, Forestry Office (ed.): From Altheeg to Vierherrnstein - names in the Frankfurt city forest . Schutzgemeinschaft Deutscher Wald, Kreisverband Frankfurt eV, 1988. City forest map
  24. ↑ Robin Göckes: Hessen's most modern shooting range . Article in the Frankfurter Neue Presse / Höchster Kreisblatt from September 17, 2013 on Kreisblatt.de (accessed on August 26, 2018)

Coordinates: 50 ° 4 ′ 21.4 "  N , 8 ° 35 ′ 30.8"  E