Westlandkessel
Westland boiler (according to the Norwegian region Vestlandet ; Norwegian Vestlandskittlar ) are made of copper or bronze created Iron Age boiler with a steep edge and a curved bottom; a vessel shape presumably imported from the provincial Roman Western Europe. More than half of all Swedish Westland boilers have been found in burial mounds with cremations in the Medelpad coastal zone . Most of the rest come from Gotland . About 125 specimens are known from Norway.
description
Westlandkessel are divided into the groups Hauken 1 (older) and 2. Westland boiler are made of copper or bronze created boiler with a steep edge, and curved base (for type Hauken 2) with triangular attach it .
The find situation in Medelpad was by and large the same: an earth-covered stone mound above a small stone box with a kettle on a stone base plate. A layer of fire lay under the boiler. In addition to burned bones, the cauldrons contained molten lumps of glass from beakers, bony arrowheads , and sometimes a little gold. The grave mound with a stone core over a layer of fire is a Norrland grave shape. The kettle filled with burnt bones and additions, deposited in a stone box, is foreign, and indeed Norwegian.
Finds
The first kettle grave scientifically investigated in 1916 is located near Kvitsle / Njurunda in Medelpad and belongs to a burial ground with originally seven hills, on which two Westland kettles were previously recovered from amateur excavations. The investigated mound showed on a 3 meter layer of fire (the cremation site) at the bottom of the stone mound, a Westland cauldron in a carefully built small box made of seven stones placed on edge. The box was lined with birch bark , some of which was preserved. Between the burned bones lay two crushed clay vessels, molten lumps from a glass vessel, some triangular bony arrowheads and bear claws (as the remains of a bear skin). Parts of molten glass, a gold finger ring and a worn solidus for Valens (364–378), who is one of the oldest in Sweden , also come from one of the cauldrons that were previously recovered . The graves will have been dug between 400 and 475. The grave of Lunde can be dated to 300 AD.
Westland boilers were also discovered in an arm of the old Rhine near the Palatinate town of Neupotz and in Kragehul on Fyn in Denmark. In 2004 the Westland boiler from Lunde was found in Medelpad. A late form is the "Gotlandkessel".
context
The import of kettles, but especially the unfamiliar burial practice in Medelpad, is said to be related to an influx from southwestern Norway. At about the same time, clay pots of the Norwegian type appear in the Norrland graves in Medelpad, but also in Ångermanland , Jämtland and Hälsingland . They have been assigned to the 5th and 6th centuries on the basis of Norwegian clay pot chronology. The clay pots may have been imported, but it is likely that they were made in Norrland by the same immigrants who dug the kettle graves.
literature
- G. Ekholm: News about the Westland boilers. In: Trier magazine 23, 1954/55, p. 224 ff.
- Åsa Dahlin Hauken: Vestlandskittlar - a study of the provinsialromersk import group i Norge. Våren, Bergen 1984.
- Michael Hoeper: Westlandkessel. In: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde (RGA). 2nd Edition. Volume 33, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2006, ISBN 3-11-018388-9 , pp. 543-545 ( preview in Google book search).