Highlights des Jahres 2022 aus Mittelalter- und Neuzeitarchäologie

Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, I am delighted to be able to report on highlights from medieval archaeology for the first time at this point. So the title of medieval archaeology is a bit misleading in that we start in the Middle Ages in our reference book and then work our way up to the New Age, or maybe even better around it. I have been working here in Westphalia since July 22. I have worked a lot in Berlin and Brandenburg and the new federal states and I find that you can also do medieval and New Age archaeology wonderfully here in Westphalia. The year 2022 is once again a record year for medieval and New Age archaeology. We can measure that with the building plans that have been submitted to us. 1,375 in number. We have checked so many plans. Of these, we have processed 299 with names. And in the end, 81 measures took place under the supervision of the specialist council. Of these 81 measures, we have discussed 41 with our own staff. In the coming minutes, I would like to show you a small selection, in a way, a bundle of our work. At this point, I would also like to thank the excavation companies, who were working hard with us, very warmly for their commitment. Without them, we would not have been able to do all of this. And I would also like to point out the special focus. The city centers have once again been the focus of our work. Most of what we will see has happened in the city centers, as can be seen here in Sendenhorst. But I will refrain from that. My colleague Andreas Wunsche will then go into it in the short presentation. This is a new hotspot in medieval archeology. And I would like to conclude by saying that this year, we have carried out anthropological investigations on site, i.e. at cemetery excavations. This is based on the excavation guidelines. And I would like to say that we have now established this procedure. And it should be useful for us to be able to grasp the sepulchral culture in Westphalia a little better and to increase the quality of the excavation of burials. I will start with an excavation in Lippstadt, in Kappelstraße 31, carried out by the company Eggenstein Exca. This is a property of the size of 350 square meters. And on this site, three medieval plots could be identified. The oldest cultural horizons date back to the 11th, 12th centuries. Among other things, a pit house of 5 by 4 meters was excavated there. Drainage ditches, which then separated the plots. A suspension beam building, which is interpreted as a spin hut. And here on the picture on the left, you can see a clay estuary. And in the foreground of the picture, a cooking area with a circular entrance. So that was a kitchen area. I would also like to point out that the company Eggenstein Exca had a paint profile made, which can be seen on the right edge of the picture. And that then, to a certain extent, a depiction of these wonderfully preserved layer sequences is preserved and perhaps even in the museum or at another suitable location. The next measure I would like to introduce took place in Ahlen-Dolberg, district Warendorf. There, management measures were carried out at the churchyard of the St. Lamberti Church. My colleague Birgit Grundmann essentially accompanied this measure. And here you can see that you can also find excellent findings in a very simple layout. On the one hand, the foundations of the church's tower from the 12th century were exposed. Then the remains of the church building from the 16th century. And to the highlight, in a way, also burials. And here you can see a stone plate grave on the right edge of the picture, probably from the Middle Ages, which appeared in the leitungsgraben. We have passed on the burials to the investigation and hope to be able to date them even more precisely. But these investigations have not yet been completed. The picture I'm showing here was taken in Beckum, district Warendorf. There, a new hotspot of medieval and modern archeology was created. Here, the market square was redesigned last year. You can see the market square very well from the drone photo, with the coat of arms of the city of Beckum in the middle. On the upper edge of the picture you can see the church of St. Andreas. And in front of it, the green area, by the way, will be redesigned this year. So there are also new archaeological investigations ahead. We have fought a few battles as far as the approval of works in Beckum is concerned, because at the church square it is a buried monument. But there was a solution to this problem. So the church square will be redesigned there. The company Goldschmidt Archeologie also found the edge of the cemetery in Propsteygasse last year. You can see that on the picture, marked with a red arrow, where there is a stone plate grave. There, the grave, which can be seen on the right picture, has been exposed. And the construction activity in Beckum is very advanced. On the picture, which we can see here, there is another arrow, where there is a construction site. So the house on which this arrow points has already been demolished. And the picture on the bottom right shows the current finds, which were exposed until recently. So they date back to the High Middle Ages. I can't go into the individual finds now, but it is to be expected that we will learn a lot about the construction history of this bas-relief on Propsteygasse. A large church courtyard excavation took place in Kosfeld-Lette on the old church square. This old church square has the special feature that it stands on the site of the old St. John the Baptist church, which was demolished at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century and then was somewhat relocated. You can see the modern church in the middle of the picture, which was then built at the beginning of the 20th century. The redesign of the old church square, among other things with water fountains, required an extensive excavation on the site, where several hundred graves were excavated by the company Archäologie am Hellweg. Interestingly, there were very different preservation conditions of the graves. Here on the right you can see a pipe ditch, which was created during the construction work. There were coffins that showed an extremely good state of preservation. You could only cut through them with a saw, as you can see here in the cut. Other graves were less well preserved. What also distinguished this cemetery was that several of the coffins were equipped with the so-called dead crowns, i.e. a sieve, usually unmarried, mostly young people or children. I'll show you another example in a moment. In the excavation in Coorsfeld-Lette, the foundation of the old St. John the Baptist church can be seen in the picture on the left. Another excavation, where numerous graves were found, took place in Döhmen, in the vicinity of St. Victor's Church. The company Jentgens Archäologie & Partner has been operating in Döhmen for many years. Incidentally, the company Jentgens Archäologie & Partner came to a preliminary conclusion there. At this point, I would like to thank all those involved for the excellent work over the years. In the end, there were some disagreements, which are difficult to explain from my point of view, which blew into the company's face to a certain extent. But I think this is a wonderful result, which can be seen over the past few years. And so it was this year. In the picture on the left, you can see the detail of a burial decorated with a dead crown, which I mentioned earlier. I hope you can see that there are glass panes and bronze wires and other flower-shaped applications on the skull. You have to imagine it a little more colorful and colorful. So that the burial, which can be examined even more anthropologically, is probably a young man with a corresponding dead crown who was then buried. Was I too late? At the end of the church burials in Stadtkern, I would like to mention Borken Weseke, Kreis Borken, St. Luthgerus. Colleagues from our department have been able to prove the outlines of the old church within the neo-Gothic building. And not only that, there are also some spolias of the old church that have come to light, which we were able to document in connection with guide works. A field of expertise of the department is church and monastery archeology, to put it that way. One of the excellent examples of this type of archeology is the Abbey of Chorwey. We carried out various measures there last year. On the one hand, actually in the abbey church, where a glass wall between the Westberg and the Langhaus was to be erected. It was a case study investigation in which we exposed Carolingian walls and ensured that these walls were not further demolished. That was a rather complicated process, but it was successful. Another example of our work in Chorwey is the excavation of an installation, one might say, in the economy of a building from the 18th century. We suspect that we have excavated a kind of smoke collector there, i.e. a central one, which led into the shafts. These shafts were probably connected to brewing or cooking plants. I would like to show some special projects as a penultimate slide, which will also be of special importance for our work in the coming years. On the one hand, the Herforder Münsterkirche. An archaeological window will be erected there, which reflects the findings of the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s when excavations were carried out. An elaborate construction project will be carried out there, which will, on the one hand, reflect the outlines of the old cross paths and, on the other hand, the findings of the excavations of the 1990s and make them visible as an archaeological window. On the other hand, I would also like to mention Hegnienburg, where we excavated a castle in a house, which exposed the wall of the castle and a tower foundation, which will also be redesigned as an archaeological window. Finally, I would like to show you an example of modern-day archaeology. In Neukirchen, St. Arnold in the district of Steinfurt, the company Archonet has excavated a war-prison camp of the First World War after preliminary investigations by Jentgens Archaeology and Partners, which are a long way back. We were able to examine this camp using various methods in advance. You can see the aerial images very nicely, which show the location of the barracks of this world war camp in the characteristics of the Wuchs. With the help of the finds, we also found the inmates there, namely French and Russian prisoners of war, with the help of specific finds, such as this Orthodox cross-hanging or a mustard bottle from Dijon, which was presumably sent to a French prisoner of war. Thank you very much for your attention.