Mahndorfer burial ground

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Coordinates: 53 ° 2 ′ 2.6 ″  N , 8 ° 56 ′ 56.6 ″  E

Mahndorf burial ground
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location Free Hanseatic City of Bremen , Germany
Location Mahndorf
Mahndorf cemetery (Lower Saxony)
Mahndorf burial ground
When 3rd century to 9th century
Where Mahndorf , Bremen / Lower Saxony

The archaeological excavations in Mahndorf concern a cemetery that was occupied from the migration period to the early Middle Ages on a sand mountain (today excavated) south of the former village of Mahndorf in the east of Bremen .

The Mahndorfer dune belongs to a chain of drifting sand hills north of the Weser . On the 20.80 meter high Fuchsberg , 250 meters west of the Bollener Landstrasse and 150 meters south of the Mahndorfer Heerstrasse , at that time still in Hanoverian territory, sand mining was carried out in the 1930s, so that Ernst Grohne , the director of the Focke Museum , competed started a rescue excavation with the excavators from the end of May to August 1939. On an area of ​​2700 m², the excavators were able to uncover and document 40 cremation burials , 75 urn graves , around 230 body burials, 190 of them in a west-east direction, and 19 horse graves.

It turned out to be an unusually long occupation time, from the 3rd to the 9th century. An older field, with a mixture of fire and body burials oriented in a north-south direction, was overlaid by the more numerous east-west row graves from the time of the beginning Christianization in the 9th century. The rich gifts, weapons and jewelry came to the Focke Museum and in 1953 Grohne published the results and the extensive finds in a detailed and exemplary form. The Mahndorfer burial ground thus became “one of the most famous of the first millennium”.

A settlement 200 meters further south, excavated by Karl-Heinz Brandt in 1962/63, revealed large and pit houses and contained numerous other finds (bronze and iron tools, weaving weights and ceramics).

The iron belt trimmings, more precisely those with brass and silver threads of the Civezzano type , which are otherwise widespread in the foothills of the Alps , on the upper Danube and on the upper Neckar , are only recorded in Bremen-Mahndorf in northern Germany. Belt sets of this type are usually dated to the 1st third of the 7th century in the area south of the Alps.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl-Heinz Brandt : On the status of the investigations in the 1st millennium settlement of Bremen-Mahndorf . In: Bremen archaeological sheets . No. 5 , 1969, p. 55–76 ( suub.uni-bremen.de [accessed on November 14, 2017]).
  2. ↑ Eva Cichy, Martha Aeissen: With a view of the Seseke - remains of an early medieval burial ground in Bergkamen , in: Archeology in Westphalia-Lippe (2011) 96–99, here: p. 97 f.
  3. ↑ Bendeguz Tobias: Strap tongues of Mediterranean belt sets with monograms. Studies on chronology and function , in: Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica 43 (2011) 151–188, here :, p. 156.

literature