Stone Age settlement of Großgartach

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The Stone Age settlement of Großgartach - a suburb of the municipality of Leingarten in the Heilbronn district - was a result of the Neolithic Revolution in the middle of the 6th millennium BC. A settlement from the Neolithic Age with large long houses, which probably dates back to the second half of the 5th millennium BC. Existed. The ceramics found belong mainly to the ceramic band culture and to the subsequent cultural complex Hinkelstein - Großgartach - Rössen .

history

Finds from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) attest to the storage areas of hunters and gatherers on the Heuchelberg . In the early Neolithic , also known as the Old Neolithic, from approx. 5500 to approx. 4900 BC. The so-called Neolithic Revolution took place in the Heilbronn area . Agriculture and animal husbandry now made a sedentary life possible in permanent homes. The climate was a little warmer and more humid than today, and the settlement area with light mixed oak forest on loess areas offered favorable conditions. Emmer , einkorn , barley, peas, lentils, poppy seeds and flax were grown; Cattle, pigs, sheep and goats were evidently not kept as farm animals, horses and poultry. Hunted game only contributed about 1% to the diet. Clay vessels and cut stone axes were made . The ornaments on the vessels gave the rural culture of this time the name of linear ceramics . The Neolithic economic miracle brought about by food production and storage brought about a population explosion and with it also conflicts, even armed attacks like in Talheim . Small hamlets lined up along the Neckar and on the gently sloping slopes of its side valleys ; around three hundred settlements are known from this period. The houses made of wood and clay are about 5 to 8 m wide and up to 30 m long; they served a family of seven to nine as living, sleeping and working places. The number of graves found is very small, cemeteries are not known in the Heilbronn area. Individual graves were recovered in Großgartach. The dead were usually buried lying on their side with arms drawn up and legs in a crouched position. As grave goods they received ceramic vessels, tools made of stone, bones or antlers as well as jewelry made of mussel shells or snail shells.

From the Middle Neolithic from approx. 4900 to approx. 4300 BC There are only two hundred known settlements in the Heilbronn area . The band ceramic culture had developed in the first half of the 5th millennium BC. Divided into regional groups named after the sites where they were found: Hinkelstein group, Großgartacher culture and Rössen culture; they are summarized as a culture sequence . A rich decoration of the vessels with pierced patterns is characteristic of them.

In the early Neolithic between approx. 4300 to approx. 3500 BC Compact hamlets of cord ceramists with small houses also emerged in the Heilbronn area in protected highlands . The number of settlements with large long houses in the loess areas of the Heilbronn area decreased to around seventy. Under a pit with the ashes of the burnt dead from the Hallstatt period , a rectangular stool grave was discovered west of the Heuchelberger Warte in a burial mound of the cord ceramists. The skeleton was on the left, facing north-south. As an addition, the dead man had a ceramic vase and two flat stone axes.

Research history

Excavations under Alfred Schliz

In 1898 the Heilbronn doctor Alfred Schliz (1849–1915), then chairman of the Heilbronn Historical Society , was offered a serpentine ax for sale. At the site he visited in Stumpfwörschig near Großgartach, he began digging for 13 years. The engineer Albrecht Bonnet with experience from the excavations on the Michaelsberg near Untergrombach supported him. Under the humus layer of a field, they discovered, between 80 and 120 cm deep, floor plans of a 5.35 × 5.80 m building, they believed. From the entrance in the northwest one came along a clay wall and an ash pit over a descending ramp, in their opinion, into the kitchen room with a deep hearth pit, which was filled with fragments of millstones and animal bones. A little above this level was, it seemed, the living room and bedroom with clay benches on the narrow sides. According to Alfred Schliz's idea, the houses were built underground in the Neolithic to protect them from the weather. In his monograph Das Steinzeitliche Dorf Großgartach (see literature), published in 1901 , he presents the knowledge he has gained to groups interested in archeology .

The ceramic finds in the hallways of Großgartach mainly belong to the band ceramic culture. In essence, it was simple utensils, almost unadorned and crudely made. A vessel in the Mühlpfad and ceramic shards in Stumpfwörschig III is part of the Hinkelstein group , which is well attested in the Heilbronn area, among other things, by finds in Böckingen , Lauffen and Ilsfeld . The main sources for the Großgartacher culture were the places Stumpfwörschig I, Wasen III and Heilbronner Bild. Ceramics from the Rössen culture were mainly discovered in Wasen I and II. The living spaces with ceramic finds from different epochs were not settled at the same time. The shape and decoration of the clay pots developed over many generations and their diversity proves the long period of settlement.

Alfred Schliz examined around 90 sites and mostly also excavated them. He assigned a floor plan that did not correspond to that of his presumed home to different building types: servants' houses , barns, small buildings, storehouses and bachelor's booths for the shepherds. For him there were individual farms or small hamlets on the sites that were found, which together formed a Stone Age clustered village . He did not discover a burial ground belonging to the village , only individual skeleton finds in the Wasen and Fuchsloch layers. He did not notice any traces of the forcible eviction of the settlers or the destruction of the village by fire. In the west, on the Massenbacher Krautweg, the state border between Württemberg and Baden prevented excavations in Schluchtern in Baden .

More recent findings

In 1990/1991 an 8-hectare area in Bad Friedrichshall-Kochendorf was completely archaeologically examined. In the ceramic period and in the subsequent Middle Neolithic there was a settlement here that allows a comparison with the settlement of Großgartach. In Kochendorf there was a multi-section palisade that Schliz in Großgartach did not recognize with his excavation method. He had concentrated on the rich central areas of a superficially recognizable site and could not recognize the frequent pit overlaps using the Bonnet-Schliz excavation method, in which the limited site was searched in layers from top to bottom. He interpreted loess wedges between two intersecting pits as clay banks and deep pits were hearth pits for him. Overlapping findings also remained undetected: fragments of the ceramic ribbon and those of the Großgartacher type appeared to Schliz at the same time. In addition, Schliz paid no attention to the discovery of brick-lined clay: in Großgartach, as in Kochendorf, all the houses were built in post construction and the rod network on the outer walls was coated with clay , which after a fire lasted as a brick-hard for thousands of years; the buildings in Großgartach were also destroyed by fire. The recessed pit houses described by Schliz did not exist and the interior structures shown are not known in Kochendorf.

In the winter of 1994/1995, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in Baden-Württemberg in Stumpfwörschig carried out archaeological investigations again for the first time since Schliz in Großgartach. The excavators came across settlement pits from the Band Ceramic and Middle Neolithic times as well as traces of the excavations by Alfred Schliz. The evaluation of the sites he noted and the distribution of the new excavations showed that there were at least two independent Neolithic settlements near Großgartach.

In 2012, the Heilbronn Municipal Museums recognized that the ceramic band finds recovered during the development work on the Kappmannsgrund II construction section on the southern outskirts of Großgartach did not belong to the well-known Kappmannsgrund archaeological site , but instead formed a separate site after a roughly 200 m wide, largely uncovered gap. It was certainly part of the settlement west of Nordheimer Straße in the Klingelweg parcel , which breaks off at the latest at the end of the oldest ceramic band (approx. 5400 BC). In the excavation pit of the first building after the space in between (Sudetenstrasse 9), the finds also come only from the oldest band ceramic culture and not from the subsequent style phases, as in the Kappmannsgrund site. The protome of a goat's head is on the wall shard of a fine ceramic body . The head of this extremely rare animal head protome is triangular with a rounded chin section and sits on the tip of an A-spiral of a piece of ornamentation. The horns are broken off and the snout is damaged. It is a protome from the younger half of the oldest linear ceramic tape (5450/5500 BC). Two similar pieces were found in Bad Nauheim-Niedermörlen .

literature

  • Susanne Friederich: New Stone Age in the Heilbronn area. From Großgartach to the Plattenwald . In: Andreas Pfeiffer (Ed.): Schliz - a Schliemann in the Unterland? 100 years of archeology in the Heilbronn area . museo 14. Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Heilbronn 1999, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , pp. 128–145.
  • Ludwig Lidl: The Stone Age village of Großgartach . In: Heimatverein Leingarten (ed.): Heimatbuch Leingarten , Leingarten 1982, pp. 21–28.
  • Alfred Schliz: The Stone Age village of Großgartach. Its culture and the later prehistoric settlement of the area. Enke, Stuttgart 1901.
  • Alfred Schliz: The Stone Age village of Großgartach, its ceramics and the later settlement of the area. In: Find reports from Swabia. 8, 1900, pp. 47-59.
  • Hans-Christoph Strien: A goat's head protom of the oldest ceramic band from Großgartach . In: Christhard Schrenk, Peter Wanner (Ed.): Heilbronnica 5. Contributions to the city and regional history . Heilbronn City Archives 2013, pp. 419–424. ISBN 978-3-940646-12-5

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Andrea Neth: First traces of settlement and old settlements . In: The district of Heilbronn. Vol. 1, 2010.
  2. ↑ a b c Ludwig Lidl: The Stone Age village of Großgartach . In: Heimatbuch Leingarten , 1982.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Susanne Friederich: New Stone Age in the Heilbronn area . In: Schliz - a Schliemann in the lowlands? museo 14, 1999.
  4. ↑ Hans-Christoph Strien: goat head protome (see literature)

Coordinates: 49 ° 9 ′ 8 ″  N , 9 ° 6 ′ 45 ″  E