Salzgitter-Lebenstedt (archaeological site)

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The archaeological site in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt is a Middle Paleolithic site in Salzgitter - Lebenstedt in eastern Lower Saxony . It was an open-air station for seasonally settled hunters and gatherers , where around 840 flint artifacts and around 50,000 year old bone material were excavated in 1952 . These included the remains of at least 16 mammoth individuals ( Mammuthus primigenius ), as well as the remains of at least 86 reindeer and the two northernmost bones of Neanderthals .

Exhibition of found objects in the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover , 2011

description

It is not known whether the mammoths were killed by Neanderthals. Since the reindeer ( Rangifer tarandus ) dominates here with at least 86, mostly adult individuals, on which there are only seldom traces of predatory food, it is more likely a group of specialized reindeer hunters. The group should have hunted from late summer to autumn, their camp was found on a bend in the Krähenriede , directly at its confluence with the valley of the Fuhse . The deeply cut glacial valley of the Fuhse was located here 60,000 years ago .

Lebenstedt is the site in the north of Germany where the system of hunting and prey decomposition could best be reconstructed. It was found that by no means a few animals were hunted according to demand, but that a number of large mammals were captured during a single hunt. Animals that were about eight to nine years old were also preferred because they alone represented more than a third of the animals that were between one and thirteen years old when they were killed. About nine reindeer were younger than two and a half years, three between three and six months old. Since the reindeer calved in May or June, the hunt probably took place between August and October.

The bones were dissected in search of bone marrow . Adult animals were preferred, whereas young animals were avoided in this regard. The hunters also spurned bones that were less marrow-rich, such as toes or jawbones. In contrast, most of the metatarsal bones were broken. The technology to get to the marrow was clearly standardized.

Lebenstedt is one of the most important places for wedge knives and bone points. It turned out that the roughly 30 bone tools had been made from mammoth bones, mainly from the ribs and the fibula . Among them was a bone point, an extremely rare find for the Middle Paleolithic. It also showed that carving was already a common processing technique at that time. Important sites with wedge knives in Germany, which occasionally occur as early as the Riss Cold Age, are the Balver Cave , Lichtenberg ( Lüchow-Dannenberg district ), Buhlen , Königsaue near Aschersleben or the Sesselfels grotto near Essing , in addition to the sites that gave the subtypes their names .

excavation

Archaeologist Alfred Tode , 1986

The site was discovered during the construction of a sewage treatment plant ⊙ . A troop leader on the construction site had brought bones with him in December 1951; his daughter took a few pieces to school. Her biology teacher realized that this bone material was not a thing of the recent past.

The site was first excavated in 1952 by the Brunswick archaeologist Alfred Tode. The excavation area covered about 150 m². In 1977 a second excavation took place on an area of ​​about 220 m². After the first publications of Todes and an interdisciplinary team, a publication on the geology of the site followed in 1991 , and archaeozoological investigations from 1996 .

It turned out that during the first excavation small pieces of bone had hardly been taken into account, while they dominated in the excavation of 1977. The same goes for the stone artifacts. While the ratio of small artifacts measuring less than 2 cm to large artefacts was 27: 813 in 1952, this value was 1576: 1780 in 1977.

The finds were found at a depth of 4.5 to 5.5 meters, the majority were between 4.8 and 5.1 meters deep. Three layers of sediment, a total of two meters thick, could be seen, in the lower two of which the artifacts were discovered. Large amounts of pollen, fungi, major plant remains, and mammalian and mollusc remains were determined. Typical inhabitants of the Arctic such as polar bears or musk oxen were missing. The Neanderthals lived in a tundra landscape with plants such as dwarf birch Betula nana , white silver arum , polar willow or herb willow . As a result, tree pollen is very rare.

Tode dated the site in 1953 to the Vistula glaciation , based on comparisons it was later also dated to the Saale glaciation. Investigations in the 1990s came to a minimum age of 50,000 years by means of radiocarbon dating ; today the site is usually dated to 58,000 to 54,000 years.

Found presentation

In the archaeological exhibition of the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum in the New Chancellery in Wolfenbüttel , the site is shown with excavation sections that are true to the original as an installation of the natural situation. The bone finds are also located there. The site is presented in other museums, such as the Natural History Museum Braunschweig and in the historical museum in Gifhorn Castle . Until 2011, artifacts from Salzgitter-Lebenstedt were exhibited in the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover . In the Salzgitter Municipal Museum in Salder Castle , an exhibition area ties in with the earlier subarctic environmental conditions at the site. The flora and fauna of that time are shown in an "ice age garden" outside .

literature

  • Alfred Tode : The Palaeolithic site in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt. Böhlau, Cologne 1982.
  • Willfried Baumann, Dietrich Mania : A Middle Paleolithic reindeer camp near Salzgitter-Lebenstedt . In: Manfred Boetzkes, Ingeborg Schweitzer, Jürgen Vespermann (eds.): The paleolithic new finds from Markkleeberg near Leipzig (with contributions by L. Eißmann and V. Toepfer). Publications of the State Museum for Prehistory Dresden. 16, Berlin 1983.
  • Sabine Gaudzinski : Bones and bone tools from the Middle Paleolithic site in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt . In: RGZM 45 (1998) 245-423
  • Sabine Gaudzinski: A Middle Paleolithic reindeer camp near Salzgitter-Lebenstedt . In: Manfred Boetzkes, Ingeborg Schweitzer, Jürgen Vespermann (eds.): EisZeit - The great adventure of mastering nature . Book accompanying the exhibition of the same name, Hildesheim 1999, pp. 121–136.
  • Christine Kellner-Depner: The open air station of Salzgitter – Lebenstedt , in: Archeology in Lower Saxony , Volume 15, Isensee Verlag, Oldenburg 2012, pp. 42–45.
  • Felix Hillgruber: The Middle Paleolithic site in Salzgitter-Lebenstedt in: Program for the 56th meeting of the Hugo Obermaier Society in Braunschweig and Schöningen from 22. – 26. April 2014 , p. 85 (pdf) ( online )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sabine Gaudzinski : A Middle Paleolithic reindeer camp near Salzgitter-Lebenstedt. In: Manfred Boetzkes, Ingeborg Schweitzer, Jürgen Vespermann (eds.): EisZeit - The great adventure of mastering nature. Book accompanying the exhibition of the same name. Hildesheim 1999, pp. 121-136.
  2. ^ Sabine Gaudzinski , Wil Roebroeks : Adults only. Reindeer hunting at the Middle Palaeolithic site Salzgitter Lebenstedt, Northern Germany , in: Journal of Human Evolution 38 (2000) 497-521, here: p. 498.
  3. ^ Alfred Tode: Mammoth hunters 100,000 years ago. Nature and people in northwest Germany during the last Ice Age due to the excavations near Salzgitter-Lebenstedt. Appelhans, Braunschweig 1954, DNB 455081182 .
  4. ^ Sabine Gaudzinski, Wil Roebroeks : Adults only. Reindeer hunting at the Middle Palaeolithic site Salzgitter Lebenstedt, Northern Germany. In: Journal of Human Evolution 38 (2000) 497-521, here: p. 501.