Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave
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| Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave | |
|---|---|
| Fürstengrab von Eberdingen-Hochdorf | |
 | |
| The bronze couch from the Hochdorf grave, in the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart. The photo does not show cannabis. | |
| Location | |
| Country | Germany |
| District | Ludwigsburg |
| Coordinates | 48.89, 9.01 |
| Site | |
| Type | Burial mound |
| Period | Late Hallstatt period |
| Excavated | 1978–1979 |
| Excavated by | Jörg Biel |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Fibre or textile |
| Hemp-bast fabrics that covered and padded the bronze couch the dead man lay on | |
| Dated | c. 530–520 BCE |
| Identified by | Microscopy |
Hochdorf Chieftain's Grave is a burial mound of the late Hallstatt period near Eberdingen-Hochdorf, in the Ludwigsburg district of Germany. Its wooden chamber, never robbed, held a man laid on a bronze couch. Woven fabrics of hemp bast covered the couch and made up its mattress and pillow. Johanna Banck-Burgess, who studied the grave's textiles, reads them as products of a local textile craft of high standing, and takes them as evidence that hemp mattered far more as a fibre in the early Iron Age than archaeologists have assumed.[1]: 111, 113, 120–121
Site
The mound lies east of the village, on a slope that falls gently south into the valley of the Katzenbach. It was once about five to six metres high and 60 metres across, but over some 2,500 years it was almost levelled, probably first by ploughing and then by erosion. The excavation ran through 1978 and 1979, with a break in winter, and the grave itself was examined and lifted in the first year.[2]: 17 The burial was built as two timber chambers, one set inside the other: the inner chamber measured 4.7 by 4.7 metres inside, the outer one 7.4 metres square.[2]: 18 Jörg Biel, who led the excavation,[3]: 11 found the grave undisturbed and very richly furnished.[2]: 20
The mound had been found by Renate Leibfried in 1977.[3]: 14 The foreword to the tenth volume of the grave's publication places the burial at around 530 or 520 BCE, as a probable date, and stresses that it was never robbed.[4]
The hemp-bast textiles
The dead man lay on a bronze couch that stood in the chamber. When the whole couch had been lifted in one block and brought to the state museum in Stuttgart, the layers of organic matter on its seat looked like a brown, crumbly mass. They were about 3 centimetres thick where the body had lain and 6 centimetres at the head end. Restorers took them off over twelve months and mapped them to scale.[1]: 111 Fibres and plant remains survived best where they touched the bronze sheet, whose copper salts had mineralised them.[1]: 111
Banck-Burgess sorts the organic remains around the couch into three groups. The first is the dead man's own clothing, three splendid cloths with costly woven borders. The second is a plain, undyed woollen cloth wrapped over him and over the couch and its bronze supporting figures, which she reads as a burial custom that hid the grave goods from view. The third, the only group she considers as possibly belonging to the couch itself, is its padding: woven underlays of hemp-bast strips and the cushioning laid directly on the seat.[1]: 111–113
She distinguishes four hemp-bast fabrics in this padding, all in rib weave. The largest was spread over the seat and the backrest as an underlay. On top of it, on the seat only, lay a fabric with stripes about 6 centimetres wide. A third covered a mattress that filled the whole length of the seat, and a fourth held cushioning at the head end.[1]: 115, 117–119 Remains of hemp-bast fabric also cling to the outside of the backrest, and remains of cloth on the supporting figures show that these too were deliberately covered, so that the couch was largely hidden.[1]: 115 Hemp-bast threads were also woven into many of the grave's tablet-woven bands.[1]: 113
The mattress was stuffed with plant matter and animal hair. Banck-Burgess counts some 20 plant species in it, among them seeds and fruits, conifer needles, grass stems, beech buds and many thin twigs of oak, birch, hazel and ash. Many of the seeds have hooks, awns or hairs, and with the coarse guard hairs of badger fur mixed in they would have held the stuffing together and kept it airy and springy. Its contents come from the local flora, and she concludes that the mattress was made in the dead man's own surroundings and probably fitted to the couch.[1]: 118–119
Identification
Udelgard Körber-Grohne, who later published the grave's biological remains, worked alongside the restorers as the layers were lifted, because fungi and bacteria began to destroy the organic matter quickly once it was exposed to air. She identified the material of 156 samples.[1]: 111–112 Her identification of the bast as hemp, and of the different types of thread in it, is published in the first volume on the grave; Banck-Burgess's chapter relies on it.[1]: 115–116
Banck-Burgess corrected one of Körber-Grohne's identifications. What Körber-Grohne had taken for badger pelts, from the hair alone, were hemp-bast fabrics with badger hairs stuck to them. Depending on how far it had decayed, the same hemp-bast cloth could look dense and ribbed next to the bronze, threadbare further away, or papery, and when dark it looked like leather.[1]: 112
The hemp bast had not been retted: the whole layer of bark, with the fibre bundles in it, was twisted into thread as it was. This left the fabrics fine but stiff and much tougher than cloth made from cleaned fibre. The few scraps of linen in the grave, by contrast, show that retting was known.[1]: 116 A reconstruction of the striped fabric by the weaver Hildegard Igel showed that cloth of this kind bends like thin sheet metal while staying flexible and strong.[1]: 117–118, 121 Körber-Grohne had explained the light and dark stripes by thread taken from different parts of the hemp stem. In the light of Igel's work, Banck-Burgess adds that the colour of hemp bast also depends on where the plant grew, the year it was harvested and how it was treated, so the bast may have come from different harvests or fields.[1]: 116, 118
In their review of the archaeological evidence for cannabis in prehistoric Europe, John McPartland and William Hegman list Hochdorf under Hallstatt phase D with a date of 530 BCE, for "microanalysis of hemp cloth". They rate it a good forensic identification, with many photomicrographs.[5]: Online Resource 2
Interpretations
For Banck-Burgess, the textiles of the grave were not gathered from distant places. They bear a single hand, she argues, and were made around the time of the man's death: the fine underwool of badger pelts went into woven bands, and its coarse guard hairs into the mattress. She sees them as products of local textile production, although the dyes and the patterns of the bands show contact with cultures south of the Alps.[1]: 112–113 She reads the padding as a mirror of that production, taken from what the craft had to hand, and not as the couch's usual furnishing. Whether the couch was padded when it was used among the living cannot, in her view, be told from the grave.[1]: 113, 121
She thinks it unlikely that hemp cloth came into fashion with the couch as an import, since hemp textiles were used for many purposes and are found at other sites of the same time.[1]: 120–121 Finds of hemp textiles in graves of the Hallstatt and early La Tène periods show, in her view, that hemp was widely used as a textile fibre in the early Iron Age. She notes that many plant fibres from archaeological textiles were once called flax without testing, and that hemp and flax fibres are so alike that even a scanning electron microscope often cannot tell them apart. The long-held view that flax was the main plant fibre of prehistoric cloth is therefore, she argues, open to question. When hemp was first brought north of the Alps and used as a fibre plant cannot, she writes, yet be said.[1]: 120
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 Banck-Burgess, Johanna (2023). "Die organischen Reste im Kontext der Bronzeliege aus dem früheisenzeitlichen Grab von Eberdingen-Hochdorf". In Biel, Jörg; Keefer, Erwin (eds.). Hochdorf X: Das bronzene Sitzmöbel aus dem Fürstengrab von Eberdingen-Hochdorf (Kr. Ludwigsburg). Forschungen und Berichte zur Archäologie in Baden-Württemberg (in Deutsch). Vol. 20. Heidelberg: Propylaeum. pp. 111–123. doi:10.11588/propylaeum.1316.c18453.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Biel, Jörg (2023). "Die Ausgrabung, Freilegung, Bergung und Dokumentation der Sitzbank und der darauf liegenden Funde". In Biel, Jörg; Keefer, Erwin (eds.). Hochdorf X: Das bronzene Sitzmöbel aus dem Fürstengrab von Eberdingen-Hochdorf (Kr. Ludwigsburg). Forschungen und Berichte zur Archäologie in Baden-Württemberg (in Deutsch). Vol. 20. Heidelberg: Propylaeum. doi:10.11588/propylaeum.1316.c18446.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Keefer, Erwin (2023). "Vier Jahrzehnte Bronzesitzbank – eine Einführung". In Biel, Jörg; Keefer, Erwin (eds.). Hochdorf X: Das bronzene Sitzmöbel aus dem Fürstengrab von Eberdingen-Hochdorf (Kr. Ludwigsburg). Forschungen und Berichte zur Archäologie in Baden-Württemberg (in Deutsch). Vol. 20. Heidelberg: Propylaeum. doi:10.11588/propylaeum.1316.c18445.
- ↑ Krausse, Dirk (2021). "Vorwort". In Biel, Jörg; Keefer, Erwin (eds.). Hochdorf X (in Deutsch). Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag. doi:10.29091/9783752005714.
- ↑ McPartland, John M.; Hegman, William (2018). "Cannabis utilization and diffusion patterns in prehistoric Europe: a critical analysis of archaeological evidence". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 27 (4): 627–634. doi:10.1007/s00334-017-0646-7.