Stone box from Heligoland

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The Helgoland stone box in the Neues Museum in Berlin

The Heligoland stone box was discovered in 1893. It is a relic of the Bronze Age on Heligoland .

History of the find

In 1893 Otto Olshausen discovered the Heligoland stone box during excavations on a burial mound called Lütje Berg ("small mountain") . Olshausen was a doctor of chemistry who retired from work in 1880 and took part in excavations on Helgoland and Amrum as a private scholar . With his investigations into the chemical composition of prehistoric finds made of various metals as well as amber, glass and leather and the analysis of bone finds, he was one of the founders of archaeometry .

Heligoland has been inhabited since the Neolithic . Several barrows from the Bronze Age form a burial ground on the Helgoland Oberland , the plateau of the main island.

The Bronze Age stone box from the 16th century BC found by Olshausen Was relatively well preserved. The side walls and the lid of the box were found, a broken piece of which lay on the floor. The elaborately crafted stone box, measuring around 2 by 2.5 meters, is made of limestone (shell limestone). At the time of the discovery, there was a skeleton in the box . Among the grave goods were a dagger and a decorative pin, which suggests that it was a high-ranking and wealthy person.

From another stone grave from the Bronze Age, which was found in 1845 by the founder of the Helgoland seaside resort, Jacob Andresen Siemens , on the Moderberg , there are few remains in the History Museum of Lund University (LUHM) in Sweden . Olshausen could no longer find the grave attachments that Andresen-Siemens had sent to Copenhagen. Jacob Andresen-Siemens wrote an excavation report that there were two gold spiral disks and a bronze battle ax in the grave.

Lost in Berlin

Olshausen sent bones and accessories to Berlin , where the skeleton was examined by the doctor and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow . He determined that it was a man who lived between 1500 and 1400 BC. Lived BC. Both the corpse and the grave goods were forgotten, and no one showed any interest in them in the decades that followed.

The then State Museum in Kiel and the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin wanted to include the stone slabs in their collections. There was even the idea of ​​exhibiting the stone box on Heligoland. In 1897 it became part of the collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin. From 1921 the box grave was exhibited in the atrium of the building, which has been called Martin-Gropius-Bau since 1981 , which at that time housed the Museum of Prehistory and Early History . The building was bombed and burned down during World War II. In the following years the building could not be entered due to the risk of collapse; he was also in no man's land near the border to the east of the city.

At the end of the 1950s, the usable pieces of the collection were recovered from the building and brought to the Charlottenburg Palace , including a wooden box with the grave slabs from Heligoland, which could not be assigned due to missing documents. The plates were set up incorrectly in the castle park and served as a "dog toilet with moss growth".

Rediscovered

Replica of the stone box in front of the Helgoland Museum

In 2008 the Museum of Prehistory and Early History moved to Museum Island . The slabs of the stone box were dismantled, cleaned and transported to the new building. At the same time, the documents on the stone box grave were found in the museum archive. A chemical analysis of the rock from which the box is made showed that the plates actually come from Heligoland. As a result, the panels were rebuilt, labeled and exhibited in the Neues Museum .

A museum visitor from Helgoland noticed the exhibit and drew the attention of the director of the Helgoland Museum , Jörg Andres, to the stone box in Berlin. Andres decided to have a 1: 1 replica of the box made and display it in front of his museum on the island. The project cost 80,000 euros and was financed by the Helgoland Museum , the Schleswig-Holstein Cultural Foundation and private sponsors. First the original was completely scanned. Then a form was made from plaster of paris and covered with a rubber jacket , which was filled with a special concrete. This process was documented in a video.

Following Jürgen Spanuth , prehistoric copper production for Helgoland had also been discussed in serious research. The grave can thus be read as evidence of an early wealth of Heligoland through copper mining. But even Alix Hänsel from the Berlin Museum uses words such as “may” or “probably” for this thesis in her essay accompanying the new installation. Her husband Bernhard Hänsel and her good friend Horst D. Schulz, mentioned in the article, had already dived for copper in the 1970s and published an article that is much criticized today, which she defends with the reinterpretation of the stone box. The discussion about Heligoland copper is adequately presented in the Spanuth article.

On August 30, 2014, the replica of the Helgoland stone box was presented to the public in front of the Helgoland Museum.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Steinkiste von Helgoland  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Stephanie Lettgen: The enigmatic Helgoland stone box grave . In: welt.de . August 16, 2014, accessed May 15, 2015 .
  2. ^ Excavation report : Otto Olshausen : On the prehistory of Helgoland. In: Journal of Ethnology . Vol. 25, 1893, pp. 500-528 .
  3. ↑ Michael Engel:  Olshausen, Hermann Otto Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 19, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-428-00200-8 , p. 529 f. ( Digitized version ).
  4. ↑ a b c d e Arne Schröder: The secret of the Helgoland stone box grave. (No longer available online.) Helgoland.de, archived from the original on September 24, 2015 ; accessed on May 15, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.helgoland.de
  5. ^ Excavation report : Otto Olshausen: On the prehistory of Helgoland. In: Journal of Ethnology . Vol. 25, 1893, pp. 500-528, here p. 511 f.
  6. ^ Report by Jacob Andresen-Siemens from October 10, 1845, in: Jacob Andresen-Siemens: Works in 2 volumes. Edited by Eckhard Wallmann, Helgoland 2001.
  7. ↑ The Stone Chest from the Bronze Age - Video about the making of the replica. In: Museum Helgoland. Retrieved January 26, 2020 .
  8. ↑ http://epic.awi.de/28810/
  9. ↑ Torsten Wewer: Ambitious archeology project: Crime about Helgoland stone box grave goes well. In: NWZ online. August 28, 2014, accessed May 15, 2015 .

Coordinates: 54 ° 10 ′ 59.2 "  N , 7 ° 52 ′ 52"  E