Necklace made from stone seeds
A chain of stone seeds was found in a stone box of 1.1 × 0.77 m, the size of which fits a children's burial, in the Dölauer Heide near Halle in Saxony-Anhalt . Here are burial mounds from the Neolithic Age .
excavation
Mound 28 , excavated in 1934 , was 20 meters in diameter and about two meters high. It contained four stone boxes, two stone packing graves and one earth grave . The person buried in grave 5 was equipped with a flint utensil , two vessels and a presumably three-row pearl necklace. The two vessels, an amphora and a beaker are splendidly decorated with a string for the time. The “Mansfeld style”, named after its core area, raised the question of how to chronologically classify graves with such richly decorated vessels in string ceramics research.
Chain
Of the 42 pearls recovered from the necklace at the time , 15 have largely been preserved. Botanically, the shiny pearls are dried fruits, the pericarp of which consists of stone cells. In 1961 E. Schwarze examined the rock-hard pearls and was able to identify them as the fruits of the blue- red stone seed ( Buglossoides purpurocaerulea , syn .: Lithospermum purpurocaeruleum ). The fruits have a shiny white smooth surface and are 4 to 5 mm long.
literature
- Monika Hellmund, Michal Stock: Shiny stone seeds - jewelry for a dead child. A stone seed chain from the Dölauer Heide near Halle. In: State Museum for Prehistory (Ed.): Beauty, power and death. 120 finds from 120 years of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle. State Office for Archeology, Halle (Saale) 2001. ISBN 3-910010-64-4 . P. 158 f.