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Lisa Bauer, an employee in the Freising district archeology department, presented the site near State Road 2350 (near Langenbach) - including a ceramic vessel restored from found objects.
© lex/ Assembly: Forster
In Niederhummel, ancient stone artifacts have repeatedly been excavated over the past 30 years.
An archaeologist now explained what it was all about.
Niederhummel
- “The stone artifacts of the oldest ceramic settlement of Langenbach-Niederhummel” in the district were now the topic of a series of lectures by the Freising District Archeology and the Freising Archaeological Association.
Lisa Bauer, an employee in the Freising district archeology department, presented the site near state road 2350, two kilometers northeast of Langenbach, using pictures in the monastery library of the Freising district office.
The scientist explained her work on the material analysis of the flint artifacts (flints) found there and the result of the origin analysis.
This also resulted in “insights into supra-regional networks”.
Ten locations listed
The site in Niederhummel is not new.
The excavation field was already known regionally and nationally in the 1990s and through the investigations of the Freising Archaeological Association under its then chairman Erwin Neumair.
Neumair and his team discovered some of the oldest Neolithic settlement traces in the Freising district, which could be dated to the time of the oldest linear ceramics (around 5300 BC).
During this time, agriculture and livestock breeding, ceramics and house building came to southern Bavaria.
Lisa Bauer listed a total of ten sites in the district, including those from Niederhummel (around 300 BC).
The problem throughout southern Bavaria is: “Some of the sites have few stone artifacts.” The site in Niederhummel was located on fertile soil next to a lake in the Neolithic.
The site includes several sites; digging was carried out there for the first time in 1991.
An oven was found, unfortunately no house floor plans.
In 2008, excavations were carried out again in Niederhummel: ten ceramic finds were compared to only 24 stone artefacts.
The artifacts and their origins
Not all types of rock can be used in the same way for making tools, explained Bauer.
The material must “have certain properties”, for example like flint (silex).
These stones are more easily split than others and break “with a shell-like fracture” after a violent blow.
They can be further processed into sharp edges.
The material is very hard, so it can be used as a tool for a long time and can even be sharpened to a certain extent.
“Until metal was used, this material was indispensable for humans.”
Examinations under the microscope are necessary to precisely determine the material and define its intended use.
According to Bauer, the origin of the raw material can “partially show contact over long distances”, because the stones “have to be brought from somewhere else” and can be “exchanged between groups”.
The raw material analysis is rather difficult: in order to be able to determine a geographical location, you have to work very precisely.
How these artifacts came to Niederhummel cannot (yet) be explained - also due to the few sources and studies.
Raimund Lex