Auf Torf gebaut. Ergebnisse einer Stadtkerngrabung in Rietberg

Also from us, a very good day. If you haven't heard of the Middle Ages and Riedberg yet, then that's not bad, neither are we. This was the first excavation in Riedberg at all. And in this respect, we would like to briefly introduce you to the local geology. The property that was examined is located on the southern edge of the old town. These are the properties Sennstraße 2 and 4 and an area of ​​a total of almost 800 square meters. And in July and August of last year, the surprisingly discovered finds were examined there within six weeks. In fact, a half-timbered building was demolished in Riedberg. And under this half-timbered building, completely harmless yellow material, yellow sandy material, appeared for the first time. But in the lower layers, as you can see in the entrance film, the ground has changed significantly. And there was a lens, the edge of a peat lens, and finds that were already on the surface in the excavation pit. And that's why it had to be reacted to very briefly. Riedberg is characterized by a historical half-timbered building. The streets and the alleys originate from the time of the Thirty Years' War in the complex. And there are still some houses that are also original, which also have house inscriptions. So also a house on the opposite side of the excavation site, the house Sennstraße No. 3. There it says the year 1629 in the house inscription. And the neighboring houses are on the old property, or are on the old property, but they are partly heavily renovated, because bombs were dropped there. Or a bomb fell in Riedberg in 1944. And that's why the houses are still half-timbered, but they are no longer old. You can see the drone image here on the excavation photo. And you can see in the west part of the excavation site a relatively large number of post holes. But from these post positions no more house foundations could be reconstructed. Because there were just a lot of buildings there. In the east part of the excavation site there were a total of five wells, which were more or less oriented at the same place. And of these were five medieval, four medieval and one modern well. It was a limestone well, which can be seen quite well here, around a barrel well and around a box well. And in the south part of the area this dark layer is noticeable, which is relatively homogeneous here and is peat-like. We are now looking more closely at this peat-like layer and it is already shown in the further excavation that it is not a homogeneous peat layer, but rather that it is basically peat-like structures, partly with wooden embeddings, with boxes. And due to the moisture retention, of course, also with many finds, including many leather finds. More than 20 shoe soles have been found by children, by women, by men. Of course, a lot of ceramics as well. And maybe you can see that in the picture. There were a lot of woods that secondarily got into these layers, where you just had to look, is it something or is it nothing? And thanks to this good wood retention, first dendrodates for this section of Rietberg's history could be obtained. Sven Spierung will present them in a moment, in a historical context. Despite the many woods you see there in the picture, it was not the case that really all samples gave corresponding information. But we have already tried to see what was going on on site to enable as large a range of dating as possible. And you can also see here in the photo the carpet-like wood that was probably used for the fortification of the underground. And later a small mine path was laid to be able to cross the wet embankments with dry feet. And this mine path is oriented towards the old property border. And this property border certainly goes back to the Middle Ages. There was also a small print, you can see that on the right image, perhaps from a fence or from the promenade of a half-timbered building, which also constitutes a point of reference for the original property border. Here we look again from above at this embankment. And you can already guess that there is a trench-like structure in front of it. And it is probably two trenches that belonged to the respective properties Sennstraße 2 or Sennstraße 4 and which show a certain offset. So that means that these trenches were probably laid in the rear area of ​​the property or also in the front area to drain the water or to drain the water that has entered the surface in this village-like embankment in a natural way, year-round. And these village embankments that you see there have also manifested themselves in the historical buildings on the right and left of the excavation area, that there is actually a larger phenomenon taking place there. The Rietberger also know that their subsoil is difficult and that the houses, these half-timbered houses, move into these crevices. Here is a cross-section through one of these trenches. You can see that this trench has been cleaned several times or probably deepened several times. And through this offset, which was represented there on site, we assume that every property owner was probably responsible for the maintenance of this trench section. But in the broadest sense they belong to a coherent trench system. The amazing thing about the trench was the early dating with which one actually could not expect a growth model from the city atlas at all. It has been assumed so far that there was a small planned city and only in the 14th century the later old town area was completely settled. And we are now here directly in the south of the old town and have two dendro data and also the corresponding finds. Once we have a small Siegburger Fasssteinzeug cup and we have a Langzinkenkamm. The Langzinkenkamm comes from a dendro-dated well from 1256 to 1256 and we have another post hole which is dated 1260 and which actually cannot be true according to the previous model. But we have so many dendro data and the ceramics fit perfectly into the 13th century. So we can say that the founding time of these two pieces really goes back to the middle of the 13th century. And with that the growth model seems to be no longer realistic. As I said, it is always a model. In the 70s and 80s they tried to reconstruct growth models from a medieval city, in this case Rietverg. And for the first time we had the possibility to look at two adjacent pieces and we are directly at the southern border of the later medieval old town until shortly after or around the middle of the 13th century. So if you look at this city what you expect the later town hall is on the north-south connection the passageway certainly a kind of market street as we have it in Wiedenbrück and as it is common in the Middle Ages. So the actual passageway which leads over the Ems from south to north completely through the old town as one main axis and not the east-bound area which is reconstructed here as the former city plan. And also the edge areas we are at the southern part of the old town already a complete foundation structure with foundation boundaries also individual plots, wells of course. They are probably a bit further north away from the main buildings. A second interesting thing is the filling. We see here this humus layer and over it another meter of filling. And this came about by increasing the entire area in the southern part when the fortification was renewed. There are written sources for this. From the 16th century, 1557 a ditch-grave system was removed and the southern fortification zone was relocated further to the outside. As a result, the medieval state was also sedimented by this filling. And we see here a deep ditch, a city ditch which is located in front of a ditch. These two profiles, east and west profiles have to do with two ditches. On the bottom left, we see a profile through these two ditches. The ditch is also overpriced. But what we are missing is what was on top of the ditch. A palisade is the minimum. A city wall is not overpriced. It would be possible, of course, at least in some areas. But if you remove the wall, you also remove all the foundations. We also have this in other cities in Westphalia. The interesting thing is this double ditch system in front of the wall, which we have not yet found in Westphalia, at least in East Westphalia. But we have them in many medieval cities in southern Germany. I'll go back again. Yes. On the right, we see the picture below with a cut through this ditch system. We have the entire southern part with a new fortification at the end of the 16th century. This is an area of ​​20,000 square meters with an area of ​​1 meter. So we are at about 20,000 cubic meters of earth that has been moved there. Of course, beyond the new ditch system, but then also to fill this unsafe area with this difficult ditch layer. Thank you very much.