Kurzvorträge Block 1 - Paläontologie/ Urgeschichte

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, finds from the time of the Neanderthal, the Middle Paleolithic, are rare in Münsterland. A window into this time offers numerous sand pits, where excavators bring material from deeper sediments to the surface. Without the engaged help of hobby archaeologists, who in their free time keep the remains of fire stone artefacts and bones of Ice Age animals, it is not possible to care for these soil entries. A particularly successful example of such citizen science is the outpost Münster in the area of a wet discharge southwest of Coesfeld. For more than 20 years, a group of German and Dutch collectors have been storing Middle Paleolithic fire stone artefacts there. In the meantime, the inventory includes about 5,000 artefacts. It is mostly made up of small-format deposits, the otherwise typical core devices are rare. The driving force of the project is Dick Schlüter from Enschede, to whom we owe a lot of interesting finds. However, the greatest success of a collector's life, namely the discovery of a Faustkeil, has so far failed him. This finally changed on the 18th of last year, when he found a 6 cm long, two-sidedly processed core device on the outpost in Coesfeld. On the one hand, you can see the piece behind me and possibly also in front of you. In nature, the piece is characterized by an almond-shaped outline, a careful bifacial processing and a sharp cross-section. Despite its small dimensions, the device can be referred to as a small Faustkeil. A dating of such a single piece is not easy to carry out. The scientific discovery of the entire fire stone artefact inventory of Coesfeld-Stevede at the University of Cologne showed that the acquisition of basic forms took place according to a special process. According to parallel finds, this discrete mining concept dates back to the time of 54,000 to 44,000 BC and thus probably also our Faustkeil. However, one aspect still needs to be mentioned. Due to special features in the mining there in Coesfeld-Stevede, the depth of the objects is reasonably well estimated. Thus, the Faustkeil originates from a depth of about 16 meters. The mass of the finds originates from a horizon of about 12 to 16 meters. In cooperation with the University of Cologne and the University of Mainz, we plan to carry out a drilling for the clarification of the stratigraphy. With the help of natural science analyses and the already known depth data, this temporal classification can then be checked. But this is material for a future press conference. Thank you for your attention. Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes there are strange coincidences. For years, hardly any finds of a certain kind have been discovered and then, one after another, several outstanding pieces follow one another. Thus, in 2018, only a edge strip of the Zyg Oldendorf from the Middle Bronze Age in Bocholt was found and then only in 2020 another edge strip of the M shape from the Early to Middle Bronze Age in Dülmen was found. After that, until the end of 2021, no other finds from Münsterland were reported. However, within a short distance, five Bronze Age finds from Sonnengängern were reported. Here you can see a map of the new finds, which I do not want to go into more detail for reasons of time. The beginning was made by a flat fin found by Bastian Busch from Borken, which was handed down in December 2021. Up here on the left in the picture. After that, in 2022, an edge strip of Michael Höck from Coesfeld followed and of Jevgeny Lange from Lüdinghausen. The fin from Coesfeld can also be seen here next to me on the panel. After that, a reused fin fragment with traces of hit from Oelde von René Metzger was reported. At first, we were not even sure whether it was a fin fragment at all, but the metal analyzes speak for themselves. Finally, a neck piece of an offset fin from Laar followed, which was discovered under the finds of Alexander Matuschik. A total of five new Bronze Age finds from Münsterland can be seen, which inspire us to deal with this kind of finds again. At this point, I would like to thank all the people from Sonnengängern for the many great finds that came to us last year. Thank you very much for your attention. I also wish you a wonderful good morning. Yes, there is something going on. We go to Sauerland, we stay in the Bronze Age. Here you can see a so-called faceted tulle ball with this wart-like structure in the middle. This is a very rare piece of late Bronze Age, perhaps early Iron Age, which unfortunately led us down a very negative path. Here you can see the object on the right, even before it came to the central services, where it was very great and could also be restored. It is the find of an illegal person, a licensed Sonnengänger, who learned on social media that this piece should be preserved. Together with the police and the prosecutor's office, we were able to preserve this piece and also punish the perpetrator accordingly. This object is also very important, because with this ball, with this wart, a new local group of these balls, which are mainly spread in Fröndenberg, Hema and obviously also in Werl, with a small focus. The second object that I would like to show you is a positive one again. Here we have an abscess of the type Kassel. We are in the middle to late Bronze Age. This object was found by a forester. Here you can see Dominik Müller, who, when clearing this storm damage, found this abscess in the root area. Unfortunately, we examined it without context. But here we have a very nice example, where we are very grateful for the attention of the forester. Why are these objects important to us? You can now see a map of the government district of Arnsberg, South Westphalia. You see black circles, you see red-filled circles. These are all Bronze Age finds. And the red ones, these are the finds since the 2000s. More than half of the Bronze Age finds that we know have actually been found completely new. They are almost always found by foresters. That is why the objects are so important. Not just the objects, but of course the place where they come from and their context and their power of speech. On this map I have dated the objects as far as possible. In the past, one always had the idea that the Middle Mountains, which of course is only gradually really penetrated in Bronze Age, would be a phenomenon that comes from the south. If we look at this map now, we can see in red and yellow, these are Old Bronze Age objects, in brown and green, the Middle Bronze Age and in violet, the Younger Bronze Age. You can now, where you evaluate these things and present them, see very clearly that it does not come from the south, it comes from the north. And that is a very significant recognition that we thank these many new finds and the attentive finders. Thank you. And with that I end. Have a nice day. Yes. With the culture of linear band ceramics, in the course of the 6th millennium B.C. a new way of life spread out over large parts of Central Europe. Instead of mobile hunter-gatherers, the band ceramics were resistant farmers who farmed and bred cattle. And it is perhaps therefore no wonder that the huge area of ​​distribution of linear band ceramics, as we have known for a long time, is largely identical to that of the fertile loess soils in Europe. Now the northern border of the loess zone runs across Westphalia. It is marked here by the dotted line. And as you can see, it is right at the border of this loess zone. In this respect, it may not have been a surprise that in the 1980s first finds of linear band ceramics appeared there. But it was still a very big surprise because this find site is still more than 60 km away from the next linear band ceramic settlement sites. Now we only knew this settlement site Minden-Dankersen by surface finds. But after, as Mrs. Hannemann already mentioned this morning, this find site, which will soon be sealed for several decades, probably through a solar park, the EWL archaeology took the opportunity for a magnetic prospection. And the result that you see here really exceeded all expectations. You see an extremely high density of finds. Essentially all dark spots that you see in the magnetogram are caused by buried pits, by neolithic pits. And here in this section you can also see very clearly the typical northwest-southeast oriented longitudinal pits and in some places even the north-west-northwest oriented pits, which are very typical for the longhouses of the linear band ceramic. We have a very similar picture as we know it from large settlement sites of the linear band ceramic, for example in the Waarburger Börde, a really very, very high density of finds, with numerous cut-through ground cracks, where it is difficult to determine the exact number of cut-through ground cracks here, which certainly did not all exist at the same time. This is also shown by the overlaps that are marked here. So a settlement that definitely existed for several generations, perhaps even for several centuries, and thus everything else was a short-lived pioneer settlement, as we might expect in this exposed location. And this, on the other hand, must assume that there must have been a settlement network, there must have been more farm settlements in the vicinity, and I hope that we will find some of them in the next few years. Thank you.