The best settlement situation: Archaeologists discovered a 3000-year-old bronze settlement during excavations in Saxony-Anhalt. More than 1000 finds, remnants of stoves and pitches and traces of several buildings were found on the approximately 5000 square meter area in the city of Wolmirstedt – including a weaving house. This testifies to the fact that this situation was already popular in the Bronze Age close to the confluence of the Elbe and Ohre. However, puzzles gives up a dead man buried in the settlement.
During the late Bronze Age around 1300 to 750 BC, a milder climate in Central Europe prevailed after a temporary cooling. New settlements and farmsteads were created in many river valleys and agriculture in the fertile valleys intensified. The so-called Nordic circle dominated in the north dominated the area of Central Germany and today’s Saxony-Anhalt: the so-called Nordic circle, the origin of which is in Scandinavia. Further in the south, people were shaped by the Lusatian culture. Extensive burial fields and settlements from post houses were typical for them, which were preferably sloped southward of river valleys.
Archaeologists from the State Office for Monument Conservation and Archeology of Saxony-Anhalt (LDA) have now discovered one of these bronze settlements in the Börde district. In the run-up to a planned stadium and sports field building, the team is currently conducting explorations and excavations on an area of approximately 21,000 square meters on the western outskirts of Wolmirstedt. The area is located on the northern edge of the river valley of the ear, not far from its mouth into the Elbe. Already during the first work, the archaeologists came across traces of an extensive Bronze Age settlement, including settlement pits, posts from houses and round pits typical of this era, originally lined with lichen work. In total, the archaeologist team has already documented around 322 archaeological findings in the square meters that had only been examined so far and recovered over a thousand finds.
Oven pits, residential building and weaving
Three of the pits on the settlement area stand out because they contain declined side walls and fragments of burned clay and charcoal. This suggests that these were bronze ovens. In one of the stoves, the archaeologists also discovered the tank of a swamp turtle in addition to ceramic shards – the animal may have been cooked in this oven and then eaten. In addition to animal bones, further finds are mainly broken pieces of different ceramic vessels. They come from rough walls and pots that are characteristic of the late Bronze Age as well as partly decorated jugs and cups, as the state office reports. But some bronze rings and plumps made of bronze and bones could also be recovered.
Some buildings from the settlement can already be identified using the post pits you have received. Accordingly, it was a larger house as well as smaller economic and storage buildings. The house was two -nave and around four meters wide and six meters long, as the archaeologists report. Not far from this, they came across the remains of another 4 by 3.30 meters in size, in which they discovered several pyramid -shaped web weights and remains of a loom. This suggests that this building was used as a weaving house. Another small outbuilding of this homestead probably served as a storage memory.
A puzzling burial
However, the find of a human skeleton in the middle of the settlement is surprising. In the late Bronze Age, it was actually common to burn the deceased and to attach their remains in urn graves outside of the settlements. Funerals of intact dead within settlements occurred, but were a rare exception. The archaeologists have now also discovered one in Wolmirstedt. The skeleton comes from a male, grown -up dead who had been buried in a crosquate and twisted head in a settlement pit. No injuries or deficiency symptoms were found on the bones that would explain the death and unusual burial of this man.
The motivation behind this and similar “irregular” burials is unclear. It would be conceivable that these dead were buried in the settlement in the context of ritual acts or that these people had a special social role in the community of these settlers, as the State Office explains. However, it would also be possible that this burial in pits was only temporary and that the dead man should actually be exhumed and burned later, but it no longer came about. More information could be given, because the excavations will continue until October 15, 2025. After that, the archaeologists will evaluate and analyze the finds and excavation data more precisely. You hope to gain a more complete picture of this settlement in the cultural border area of the Nordic and Lusatia culture.
Source: State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology Saxony-Anhalt-State Museum for Prehistory
