Sirgenstein Cave
| Sirgenstein Cave
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| Location: | Akhtal , Swabian Alb , Baden-Württemberg , Germany | |
| Height : | 565 m above sea level NHN | |
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Geographic location: |
48 ° 23 '13.3 " N , 9 ° 45' 40.3" E | |
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| Cadastral number: | 7624 / 3a | |
| Type: | Horizontal cave | |
| Discovery: | 1488 | |
| Lighting: | no | |
| Overall length: | 42 m | |
The Sirgenstein is a Stone Age residential area in the district of Weiler , a district of Blaubeuren in the Alb-Danube district of Baden-Württemberg in Germany .
The Sirgenstein is a twenty meter high rock of the White Jura on the north-western slope of the Achtal between Blaubeuren-Weiler and Schelklingen , which is at an altitude of 565 m above sea level. NHN lies. The karst cave is located in a sponge reef around 35 meters above today's valley floor. The archaeological site is divided into the Sirgenstein cave , a residential cave , and an abri on the south wall. The Sirgenstein castle rest was preserved from the Middle Ages .
In 2017, the Sirgenstein Cave was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the World Heritage Site Caves and Ice Age Art of the Swabian Alb .
description
The entrance to the cave is 5.40 meters wide and faces south-west. It is located directly under a rock overhang. The total length of the cave is 42 meters with a width of five meters and a height between 1.5 and 10 meters. At the back, the cave is illuminated by two natural openings in the ceiling.
history
The Sirgenstein Cave was first interpreted in 1488 by the Ulm Dominican Felix Fabri (1438–1502) in his work Historia Suevorum as the home of a “monstrous Cyclops”. The population at that time used cave deposits as fertilizer on their fields. They could not explain the bones that they found again and again, so they attributed them to a cyclops.
In 1866 Oscar Fraas (1824–1897) began archaeological research in the Blue Valley . The Sirgenstein Cave was initially not examined. Friedrich August Quenstedt (1809–1889) brought up the Sirgenstein Cave as a possible living space.
It was not until 1906 that the cave was fully excavated by Robert Rudolf Schmidt (1882–1950) from the University of Tübingen . After layers from the Modern Age , the Middle Ages , the Roman , Iron and Bronze Ages , he found a complete sequence of layers in the cave from the Younger to the Middle Paleolithic . Schmidt subdivided the artefacts found in it into a total of ten layers based on the French model, which are divided between the forecourt and the interior of the cave. It was the first cave in Germany in which this procedure was used.
The find material recovered by Schmidt contained around 5,000 flint artifacts and countless rubbish, but only a few bone tools, including projectile tips , awls and smoother .
literature
- Robert Rudolf Schmidt: The Sirgenstein and the diluvial cultural sites of Württemberg , E. Schweizerbartsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1910.
- Hans Binder , Herbert Jantschke: Cave guide Swabian Alb. Caves - springs - waterfalls . 7th completely revised edition. DRW-Verlag, Leinfelden-Echterdingen 2003, ISBN 3-87181-485-7 , p. 212 .
- Stephan M. Heidenreich, Conny Meister: Information brochure on the world heritage application caves of the oldest ice age art , State Office for Monument Preservation in the Stuttgart Regional Council, 2016, pp. 72–75.
Web links
- Sirgenstein website on the website of the Prehistoric Museum Blaubeuren , accessed on February 12, 2017.