A group of almost 30 cinerary urns in unusually good condition have been unearthed near Moisburg in the province of Lower Saxony in northern Germany. They date to the Late Bronze Age (1200-600 B.C.) Urnfield culture and include several complete cremation burials from the period in Lower Saxony.
The urns were discovered on a road between Moisburg and Immenbeck during construction of a drainage ditch. Archaeologists from the Hamburg Archaeological Museum (AMH) were on site to supervise the construction project because the remains of cinerary urns had been found along the road in the 1930s, so they expected they might find more of them. What they did not expect was to find ones still intact. In the 1960s, deep plowing became standard practice in German agriculture. Urnfield graves, which were buried in flat fields with no markers or at least none that survived, were sitting ducks and intensive modern agriculture severely damaged or destroyed many of them.
As the name says, Urnfield cultures cremated their dead, placed the cinerary remains in urns and buried them in open fields. The Moisburg finds are typical for Urnfield graves: cinerary remains were placed inside pottery vessels and the urns buried in a pit. Some of the pits are enclosed by fieldstones and topped with an inverted bowl or a flat capstone.
“Unfortunately, and this is also typical for the time, very little can be found in the urns other than the cremated bones of the deceased,” explains [district archaeologist Dr. Jochen] Brandt. The cremated remains – the term for the ashes of those buried after a cremation – will be scientifically examined if funds can be raised. Then, after around 3,000 years, at least some of the dead will still reveal their gender and age.
* This article was originally published here
No comments:
Post a Comment