Knovíz culture
The Knovíz culture is one of the urn field cultures . It comes from the Middle Bronze Age barrow culture and was widespread in central and north-west Bohemia . It is named after the site Knovíz near Slaný in Central Bohemia in the Czech Republic . Its northern border generally corresponds to the course of the Elbe . It extends over the entire Urnfield Period (1300–800 BC), so it lasted more than half a millennium. Characteristic are amphorae , tiered vessels and bowl-like shapes with comb-line decoration.
The network of their settlements is dense, although they are not always simultaneous locations. Finds and traces of settlement are common. Human skeletons in unnatural locations or skeletal remains in settlement pits have created the image of a society to which cannibalism belonged. The people of the Central German Unstrut group were connected to the Knovíz culture and, like them, practiced dismembering bodies.
Cremation
The burial rite of the Knovíz culture is cremation, which was already known in the time of the tumulus. The grave shape is the flat grave with the burial of an urn in a pit. An amphora, a double cone or an amphora-like storage vessel served as the urn. A deviation from this is the distribution of the corpse burn over several vessels. There is also ash scattering in a shallow pit with a few shards. A characteristic of the Knovíz cremation graves is the addition of the rest of the inventory in the urns, if their size allowed this. The urns were sometimes covered with a flat stone, otherwise they stood on one. Often there is an opening ( soul hole ) above the floor or in the middle of the floor with a diameter of about 2 cm. Occasionally the location of the grave seems to have been marked (post hole for wooden steles). In the Knovíz culture it is difficult to identify attributes of men's, women's or children's graves using the grave equipment or certain ceramic types; especially since Knovíz graves contain few bronzes.
The Knovíz cremation graves occupy a special position under burial mounds (Velká Dobrá near Kladno , burial mounds No. 20, 22 and 56). They differ in their location from the Middle Bronze Age graves, which are located under the burial mound on the original surface. In contrast to the large, well-equipped burial mounds in the area of Žatec (north-west Bohemia), the cremation graves of Velká Dobrá with their poor inventory do not provide an opportunity to determine the social status of the buried. On the cemetery of Manětín- Brdo ( Plzeň-North district ) there were some of the simple cremation graves that were further apart from the others and had larger stones at a distance of about two to three meters on their periphery. Remains of a stone ring at the foot of a mound, as the excavator O. Kytlicová suspects.
Burial grounds
Based on the situation on the larger burial grounds, it must be assumed that the cremation took place in a place reserved for it. Cremation sites are known from Zvírotice in the central Vltava valley, Lety near Prague, Mšec near Rakovník and perhaps also from Sedlčany . The remains of charcoal from beech (Fagus silvatica) and fir (Abies pectinata) have been preserved on the fire site in Zvírotice .
The two largest cremation cemetery fields with more than 100 and more than 50 graves were excavated in the central Vltava valley before the Second World War . Unfortunately no anthropological material was extracted. Neither did this succeed at the burial ground in Mšec (Rakovník district), where only miserable remains of around 80 graves remained. In Manĕtín-Brdo and Obory (in the Middle Moldau region) almost 90 graves have been excavated in both cemetery. The cemetery in Obory is located in a hilly area that is unsuitable for agricultural use, but which was suitable for pasture farming that could feed a large population in a relatively small area. There are other incompletely excavated grave fields and settlements identified by surface finds, most of which belong to the Hallstatt A2 time horizon . The cemetery at Obory, discovered by chance, is in an area with old prospecting. In this part of the landscape there are ore-bearing zones in the outcrops of which humans could have found copper. No evidence of this could be found, in particular the bronze inventory in almost half of the Obory graves suggests it. Compared to the graves from the other parts of Bohemia at the same time, this is a high percentage. In this context it should be noted that modern gold mining has started in the area. It was here that it was demonstrated for the first time that the bearers of the Knovíz culture knew and used gold. ' It is a small wire ring, as part of a necklace with blue glass corals.
The anthropological analysis of the eastern part of the cemetery with 44 burials showed only the remains of a single dead person. They were all from women or non-adults. The women were short, reached an average height of 150 cm, and had a graceful build. Their mean age was around 44 years. It would be premature to speak of separate women's and men's burial grounds, because this is the first anthropological analysis of a larger Knovíz complex.
Body burial
The ritual body burial of the Knovíz culture is rare. Only five cases are known from Bohemia. Four of them come from north-west Bohemia, the fifth (Holubice) from the area around Prague . These are burials in stone boxes . As a rule, they are graves with a richer inventory. With regard to their geographical location, an influence from the Bavarian-Thuringian area is seen in them, where they are more common. The body grave of Velká Dobrá (Kladno district) remains, where apart from Middle Bronze Age barrows, three Knovíz cremations were located under burial mounds. In the tumulus No. 24, where the deceased was laid in a stretched position facing east-west, the inventory dates the find to the early phase of the Knovíz culture.
The body burials in pits within Knovíz settlements are not a mass phenomenon, considering the amount of Knovíz settlement finds. The fact that most of them are men and a smaller number of children suggests an abnormal character. There could be various reasons that led to this burial method. Interpretations will always be in the range of hypotheses, because anthropological studies will in most cases not provide a reliable answer.
Ritual anthropophagy probably took place only in exceptional cases and refers to finds of individual human bones. The authors of the last major work on the ritual customs of the Knovíz culture see the violently killed people primarily as human sacrifices for the fertility and vegetation deities. Incomplete skeletons in pits are more likely evidence of executions than sacrifices, in their opinion.
The authors also record cases of mass burials in trenches and similar objects, which, analogous to other phenomena, were common in the transition period between the late tumulus and Knovíz cultures. Their double trenches did not emerge at the same time, but their destruction evidently occurred simultaneously or at short intervals. In addition to broken ceramics, animal bones and a pot of gold, numerous human bones have been found. These are scattered bones that have already entered the trenches without any soft tissue. It is difficult to judge whether they are victims, as J. Bouzek and D. Kouteckŷ (1980) interpret similar phenomena. Velim is about a development tending towards Lusatian culture . The site is on the border of the cultural areas, where mutual influence is evident.
literature
- Jiří Hrala: Cult customs in burial of the Knovíz culture. In: Friedrich Schlette , Dieter Kaufmann (ed.): Religion and Cult in Prehistory and Early History (= Historians' Society of the GDR. Conference of the Pre- and Early History Section. Vol. 13). Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-05-000662-5 , pp. 245–249.
- Jiří Hrala, Miloš Vávra, Zbyněk Sedláček: Velim. A fortified settlement of the Middle Bronze Age. In: Radomír Pleiner, Jiří Hrala (ed.): Archeology in Bohemia 1981–1985. Archaeological Institute of Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague 1986, pp. 79-88.
- Jiří Hrala: The Knovíz Culture. Short overview. In: The Urnfield Cultures of Central Europe. Symposium Liblice 21.-25. October 1985. Archaeological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Praha 1987, 189–193.