Skull burial in Metzendorf-Woxdorf

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The skull burial in Metzendorf-Woxdorf

The skull burial of Metzendorf-Woxdorf is a Neolithic partial burial of a single human skull , which was found in 1958 near Woxdorf , a district of the Seevetal municipality in the Harburg district of Lower Saxony . The find is so far the only one of its kind in the individual grave culture in Germany and is shown in the archaeological permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Hamburg-Harburg .

Find

Even before the skull burial was found, numerous archaeological finds were made due to the intensive agricultural use of the land in the vicinity. However, this site was on a flat hilltop between two fields and has not yet been used for agriculture. The find came to light during leveling work for the Metzendorf water supply association, when the topsoil of the hilltop was removed with a bulldozer for the construction of a pipeline. The workers noticed broken fragments in the building site, stopped their work at this point and reported the find to the Helms Museum. During the subsequent excavation , a large, upside-down, giant beaker came to light at a depth of 30 cm , the bottom of which and the wall of which had been broken by the leveling work; it was placed over a foot shell inside of which were the remains of a single human skull.
Location: 53 ° 24 ′ 31.4 "  N , 9 ° 57 ′ 31.2"  E Coordinates: 53 ° 24 ′ 31.4 "  N , 9 ° 57 ′ 31.2"  E

Findings

Drawing reconstruction of the grave complex in situ

The footshell, made of brown-gray clay, was placed on three smaller stones. It has a height of 105 mm, a diameter at the base of 83 mm and at the mouth of 207 mm. The outside of the wall of the bowl is decorated with about 23 mm long, irregular, parallel impressions of a comb-like stamp. Two thirds of the foot shell was filled with humus soil on which the skull lay. The large, giant beaker, the interior of which was intact before the discovery, was placed over this bowl. The drawn-in wall below the rim of the vessel had been carefully edged with larger stones on the outside. The giant mug is made of brown-gray to red-brown clay. It has a height of 425 mm, the diameter at the base is about 97 mm, at the mouth 240 mm and the largest width is 195-210 mm above the base with 265 mm. The fragments of the damaged bottom of the vessel could not be found again. Below the edge, the vessel wall on the shoulder is decorated with an irregular row of small triangular punctures, the tips of which point downwards. The shape of the giant beaker corresponds to the Bentheim type group according to Karl Hermann Jacob-Friesen , even if this vessel stands out due to its size. Wegewitz suspects that there is a storage jar in this giant cup. The skullcap is preserved from the skull to the ear bone and nasal bone , the facial skull and the upper jaw are presumably gone after the burial, the closed air space inside the large vessel favored the preservation of the skull in contrast to storage in the well-ventilated sandy soil at the place of discovery . Few remnants of tooth enamel were found in the earthy filling of the foot shell . Because of the small amount, Wegewitz suspects that only the upper jaw was present when the head was buried and that the lower jaw and cervical vertebrae may have been missing when the head was laid down. The skull was most likely that of a grown man . Whether the burial was deepened in a pit or above ground could not be clarified due to the lack of discoloration at the excavation site. It also remains open whether it was created in the immediate vicinity or possibly over the completely past body burial .

Because of the ceramic vessels found, the burial is typologically dated to the Neolithic around 2200 BC. Chr. Dated .

interpretation

The partial burial of a skull, separated from its body, is so far unique for Neolithic Northern Germany and suggests cultural influences from Early Bronze Age Bohemia , where such separate burials of heads in ceramic vessels with the bodies buried underneath were common. The use of giant cups of the type found in Woxdorf is also widespread there. Archaeological finds of similar giant cups in the Hanoverian Wendland along the Elbe support the thesis of cultural connections to Bohemia, but in Wendland the vessels were always found empty, so that their use as a burial vessel seems rather unlikely.

literature

  • Willi Wegewitz : A skull burial of the individual grave culture . In: News from Lower Saxony's prehistory . tape 29 , 1960, ISSN  0342-1406 , p. 6-17 .
  • Friedrich Laux : Skull burial from Metzendorf-Woxdorf, Gem. Seevetal, Ldkr. Harburg . In: Ralf Busch (Ed.): Find and Interpretation - Old and New Finds from the Archaeological Collections . Hamburg Museum for Archeology and the History of Harburgs Helms-Museum, Hamburg-Harburg 1995, p. 28-29 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Subject area Death, Showcase No. 53.
  2. ↑ a b c Rüdiger Articus, Jochen Brandt, Elke Först, Yvonne Krause, Michael Merkel, Kathrin Mertens, Rainer-Maria Weiss: Archaeological Museum Hamburg, Helms Museum: A tour through the ages . In: Rainer-Maria Weiss (ed.): Publications of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg Helms-Museum . No. 101 . Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-931429-20-1 , pp. 78 .
  3. ↑ a b c Willi Wegewitz : A skull burial of the individual grave culture . In: News from Lower Saxony's prehistory . tape 29 , 1960, ISSN  0342-1406 , p. 6-17 .
  4. ^ Willi Wegewitz : A skull burial of the individual grave culture . In: News from Lower Saxony's prehistory . tape 29 , 1960, ISSN  0342-1406 , p. 7 .
  5. ^ Karl Hermann Jacob-Friesen : Introduction to Lower Saxony's prehistory . Lax, Hildesheim 1959 (Figs. 156, 157).
  6. ^ Friedrich Laux : Skull burial from Metzendorf-Woxdorf, Gem. Seevetal, Ldkr. Harburg . In: Ralf Busch (Ed.): Find and Interpretation - Old and New Finds from the Archaeological Collections . Hamburg Museum for Archeology and the History of Harburgs Helms-Museum, Hamburg-Harburg 1995, p. 28-29 .