Steles from Ellenberg
The steles of Ellenberg are two Guxhagen district Ellenberg in northern Hesse Schwalm-Eder-Kreis found endneolithisches artifacts from sandstone .
The stele from 1907
The 85 cm high, slim stele is made of red sandstone , probably from the nearby Edertal. It is decorated on its entire front with horizontally and vertically lined up, completely depicted or cut (raised) triangles. This pattern is incomplete on the two side edges, which suggests that the ornamentation on once existing neighboring stones was taken up and continued. The sides of the stone are bevelled, which can mean a former arrangement with more stones in a circle.
The stone is exhibited today in the Hessian State Museum in Kassel. A not very lifelike replica stands in front of the village community center in Ellenberg.
Find history
The area of discovery between Eder and Fulda was formerly a wooded, slight elevation. In 1854 the trees were completely cleared and the area was used as arable land until 1954. The previous elevation has therefore completely disappeared.
In 1873 Eduard Pinder, director of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, had proven the existence of three burial mounds at this location. A teacher from Ellenberg noticed that in a field in the Ellenberg district, larger pieces of stone were repeatedly brought to light during agricultural tillage. According to a local legend , a pagan king's grave is said to have been at this point.
In 1907, the Kassel museum administration was informed about an alleged archaeological find. Since the then director of the Fridericianum Museum, Johannes Boehlau , had just left for an excavation on the Greek island of Samos, the retired Major General Gustav Eisentraut and the librarian Wilhelm Lange first examined the site. They began in October 1907 to excavate the site on a 14 × 14 meter area. In doing so, they oriented themselves on the basis of the stone structures found and did not, as is common today, remove the soil in layers; meaningful information was therefore lost.
Traces of charcoal and ash as well as ceramic shards from the end of the Neolithic (approx. 2800–2200 BC) were found. Remains of a stone circle have been discovered on the northern edge of the hill . The most important find was the stele, which was located with the triangular ornamentation downwards within the stone circle. Due to the high quality of the stone work, Lange and Eisentraut initially assumed a dating from the Middle Ages . Eisentraut even did not rule out the possibility that it could be a former court of the Breitenau monastery , surrounded by a stone circle with some stone benches and a stone seat for the judge.
In the spring of 1908, museum director Boehlau carried out new excavations. He came to the conclusion that the site was neither a court nor a painting site . On the basis of the ceramic finds, he assumed a Neolithic tomb to which the decorated stele belonged.
On the one hand, it is conceivable that the stele formed a section of the walls of a stone box grave. On the other hand, it could also have been part of a complex with a religious or astronomical function; This is a possible interpretation, since one can reconstruct an arrangement of around 12 such stones in a circle based on their dimensions.
The stele from 1923
About 800 m southwest of the place where the first stele was found, a second stele was found in 1923/24 that was broken in two and was 1.84 m high. While the 1.51 m high upper part is decorated with a herringbone pattern, the much shorter lower part is without any ornamentation. The break point between the two parts is a kind of notch between the decorated upper part and the undecorated lower part.
Similarities in the ornamentation of the two steles and that of waves point to the time from the middle of the 4th to about the middle of the 3rd millennium BC for their manufacture and primary use.
context
The pattern of the stele from 1907 connects it with a similarly decorated shard from Droßdorf , which was found in a linear ceramic fountain in 2014.
literature
- Klaus Albrecht: The Stele of Wellen (Gde. Edertal, Schwalm-Eder-Kreis) - a Neolithic lunar calendar? In: Archaeological correspondence sheet. Volume 30, 2000, pp. 45-51.
- Wolfgang Dehn, Josef Röder: Hessian stone boxes and early metal. In: Find reports from Hessen. Volume 19/20, 1980, pp. 164-165.
- Anne Fingerling: Searching for traces back to the Stone Age , k Kulturmagazin, No. 199, Kassel, April 2014, pp. 40–41
- Irina Görner: The burial mound of Guxhagen-Ellenberg, Schwalm-Eder district, special print from Fund reports from Hessen 50, Kassel, 2010
- Johannes Groht : Menhirs in Germany. State Office for Monument Preservation and Archeology Saxony-Anhalt, Halle (Saale) 2013, ISBN 978-3-943904-18-5 , pp. 54, 138, 149.
- Fritz-Rudolf Herrmann , Albrecht Jockenhövel : The prehistory of Hesse . Theiss, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-8062-0458-6 , p. 397.
- Irene Kappel: Stone Chamber Tombs and Menhirs in North Hesse, Guide to North Hesse Prehistory and Early History 5. Kassel, 1989.
- Horst Kirchner: The menhirs in Central Europe and the menhir thought (= Academy of Sciences and Literature. Treatises of the humanities and social sciences class. Born 1955, No. 9). Wiesbaden 1955, p. 67.
- Dirk Raetzel-Fabian : The first farming cultures. New Stone Age in Northern Hesse (= prehistory and early history in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Kassel. Volume 2). 2nd ed., Kassel 2000, pp. 139–148.
- Detlef Schünemann: News from grooved and gutter stones. Attempt to form groups based on exact profile measurements. In: The customer. NF Volume 43, 1992, 90.
Web links
- Klaus Albrecht: The Stele of Waves: Lunar Calendar - Moon Symbolism? (with photo of Ellenberg's stele) , November 14, 1999