Bar hoard from Oberding

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The clasp bullion hoard of Oberding is a great hoard of 796 clasp bars of copper , which from the early Bronze Age comes. It was discovered in 2014 in Oberding , Bavaria .

description

The site is on a loess- covered high terrace on the eastern edge of the Erdinger Moos , which has existed since the Neolithic around 5300 BC. Is inhabited and has a high density of sites.

The hoard was placed in the loess soil in a niche on the edge of an early Bronze Age waste pit and is associated with animal bones and ceramic shards. It consists of 71 bundles of 10 copper bars, two bundles of 12 bars and one bundle of eight and 11 bars each. The rest of around 40 poles could not be assigned to any bundles. The copper weighs 82 kilograms. The number 10 on the bundles is noticeable, as the 100 gram bars weigh about 1 kg in bundles of ten. This is an indication that the decimal system played a role.

Some of the bundles were combined into larger bundle packages. The rods, which are slightly curved at the ends and are therefore referred to as clasp bars, are around 30 centimeters long. They were made as a cast . Bars are considered to be the Bronze Age basis for exchange and the oldest primitive money . They are pieces of raw material that are intended for further processing. Blacksmiths could use it to make weapons, jewelry and other devices such as sickles .

Discovery and Investigation

The after-school care center was discovered in spring 2014 before the construction of a house on the southern outskirts of Oberding. Since the construction site was located within a well-known ground monument in the form of a settlement from the Early Bronze Age, an archaeological investigation of the building site was carried out by an excavation company prior to construction . The hoard was found at a depth of about 1.3 meters.

The hoard was salvaged as a block salvage in a smaller and a larger earth block with a weight of 1.2 tons . In the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments , the finds were removed from the earth blocks in layers. In addition came imaging procedures are used. Using computed tomography (CT), the archaeologists gained insights into the content and were able to visualize the find in 3D . Furthermore, metal analyzes , C14 analyzes for dating, archaeozoological and paleobotanical investigations were carried out on the found object, which also included ceramic, animal bones and plant remains from the waste pit . C14 age determinations on cereal grains and an animal bone fragment from the waste pit showed a date between around 1900 and 1500 BC. The casting of the clasp bars is dated to the Early Bronze Age (1750 to 1650 BC), as indicated by the ceramics from the context of the find, the bar shape and the raw copper used. Metal analyzes showed that around half of the bars consist of a purer copper, which is believed to have come from copper deposits in the Salzburger Land . The other half of the bars consists of cast copper , the chemical composition of which speaks for deposits in Slovakia and the Austrian Inn valley .

The find is exhibited in the Erding Museum. From September 21, 2018 to January 6, 2019, the bar stock in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin was part of the exhibition Moving Times. Archeology shown in Germany , which took place on the occasion of the European Cultural Heritage Year 2018.

literature

  • City of Erding (Hrsg.): Spangenbarrenhort Oberding. Bundled and buried - a mysterious copper depot from the Early Bronze Age. Museum Erding, Schriften 2, Erding 2017.
  • Harald Krause, Sabrina Kutscher, Carola Metzner-Nebelsick , Ernst Pernicka : Copper Bars - European Currency of the Early Bronze Age? In: Archeology in Germany . 3/2018.
  • Sabrina Kutscher: The early Bronze Age bar hoard of Oberding, district of Erding. First results. 2017. (online)
  • Harald Krause: The early Bronze Age bar hoard from Oberding - a successful project introduces itself. at: academia.edu , (online)
  • Harald Krause, Sabrina Kutscher, Carola Metzner-Nebelsick, Ernst Pernicka, Björn Seewald, Jörg Stolz: Europe's largest bar hoard: The early Bronze Age copper treasure from Oberding. In: Matthias Wemhoff , Michael Rind (Hrsg.): Moving Times - Archeology in Germany. Exhibition catalog. Petersberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7319-0723-7 , pp. 167-169. ( Online)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Henning Haßmann : Treasure Finds from the Bronze Age - Evidence for a wide-ranging economic and value system. In: Matthias Wemhoff , Michael Rind (Hrsg.): Moving Times - Archeology in Germany. Exhibition catalog. Petersberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-7319-0723-7 , p. 156 ff.
  2. ↑ Stars from the underground at Welt online from January 8, 2018.