How Archeology and Urban Development Are Connected
WWhen he presents sensational discoveries to the public, such as the Nebra sky disc, Ötzi the glacier mummy or the Celtic prince from the Faith Hill, he is sure to attract attention. Groundbreaking insights can and do not result from this. On the other hand, there is the research of finds, which usually goes unnoticed and often lasts for many years. Such an unspectacular, but technically important and also interesting for laypeople inventory is now available in the book “Prehistoric grave finds from Frankfurt am Main”.
The history of Frankfurt did not begin with Charlemagne, says Wolfgang David, the director of the Archaeological Museum, in whose series the monograph was published. You can go back even further: the Romans were not the first either. When they resided in the northwest of present-day Frankfurt in the second and third centuries AD and influenced their Civitas Taunensium from the regional capital Nida, the urban area already had a few thousand years of settlement history behind it. The Mesolithic and Neolithic finds from Cathedral Hill date back to the 6th millennium BC. The approximately 450 burial mounds in the city forest date mainly from the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Archeology and the development of a big city are closely linked
The finds from those epochs, in which the people in Europe did not yet provide written evidence, but made significant technical and cultural progress, spoke of the volume presented in the Archaeological Museum. The author is Christoph Willms, who was curator of the prehistoric collection at the Archaeological Museum from 2001 to 2013. When he came to star in 2015, he left behind the manuscript for the monograph, which was edited by Michael Overbeck and has now been published lavishly illustrated.
Artifacts discovered in Frankfurt soil include clay vessels, razors, swords and lances as well as elaborate combs, glass beads, brooches, necklaces and rings. Especially the jewellery, which could be found in a similar, albeit not always of the same high quality, on the arts and crafts market of the present, brings the past thousands of years back closer. Examples include a pair of scales, a dog’s head and two small bronze combs with handles in the shape of horses. They come from the La Tène period, they were found in 1905 in Fechenheim, a stone’s throw away from the basin of today’s Oberhafen. The arm ring and the two leg rings from the Hallstatt period, which were found in a sand dune in the Riederwald in 1865, and a bronze neck ring, which comes from a woman’s grave discovered in Eschersheim in 1899, look like a modern look.
The early historical finds are one strand of the book, the other is the excavation and collection history between the turn of the 18th century and the beginning of the Second World War, including the biographies and methods of the excavators. It is therefore also about a decisive chapter of modern times, at the beginning of which the European spirit of the Enlightenment gripped Frankfurt and aroused interest in archeology and during the course of which the bourgeois and imperial city became a modern industrial, service and transport metropolis.