Zedau's cult fire place

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location

The cult fire place of Zedau is located in Zedau , a district of Osterburg in the north-eastern Altmark in Saxony-Anhalt . In the years 1970–1973 117 fireplaces were excavated in connection with the investigation of a Young Bronze Age settlement. The places are collections of similar fireplaces, which were almost always set up in an exposed position and in the immediate vicinity of the water. They are sometimes located near Bronze Age graves and mostly away from settlements. The fireplaces, which can be found randomly or in rows, depending on where they were found, very rarely contain finds and are hardly detectable above ground.

context

In Scandinavia and northern Germany , the Gargruben first recognized in 1906 ( Danish Kokegroper , Swedish Kokgropar med Skärvsten , English Pit Alignments ) are a phenomenon of the younger Bronze and Iron Ages . The more recent research no longer calls such sites as cooking pits, but rather as cult fire or fireplace sites. In 1989 Sigrid Heidelk-Schacht listed 30 such places in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and in the north of Brandenburg and Saxony-Anhalt, including Zedau.

The cult fire series

On the northern slope of a valley sand island, facing the wet meadows of the Biese 400 m to the north, a section of the Milde-Biese-Aland river, is the probably 310 m long row of around 145 fire places. 117 of them were excavated in the years 1970–1973 and around 30 destroyed could be calculated. The beginning and end of the series were probably recorded. It ran slightly arched just under a meter below the highest point of the valley sand island and was oriented east-west. The round to oval pits were about two meters apart and were 0.9 to 1.3 m in diameter. They were shallow, trough-shaped with residual depths of 0.15 to 0.3 m. The pits contained deep black earth, charcoal and in the upper area one or two layers of annealed stone, but, as usual for the genus, no other finds. Stratigraphically, the fireplaces are located between a Late Bronze Age settlement from the 2nd half of the 10th century BC. And the settlement of the pre-Roman Iron Age from the 1st half of the 1st century BC. The dating of the charcoal from two fireplaces resulted in 2718 ± 100 BP and 2715 ± 100 BP (i.e. around 768 and 765 BC, respectively).

See also

literature

  • Sigrid Heidelk-Schacht: Young Bronze Age and Early Iron Age cult fire places in the north of the GDR In: Friedrich Schlette and Dieter Kaufmann (eds.): Religion and cult in prehistoric times . Akademie Verlag Berlin 1989.
  • Fritz Horst: Settlement and sacrificial place of the younger Bronze Age of Zedau. Ot. von Osterburg (Altmark) In: Zeitschrift für Archäologie 10, 1976, pp. 121-130.
  • Lil Gustafson, Tom Heibreen, Jens Martens: De gåtefulle kokegroper: (Eng. The mysterious cult fire places) Kokegropseminaret November 30, 2001

Web links

Coordinates: 52 ° 47 ′ 30.1 ″  N , 11 ° 43 ′ 20.9 ″  E