More than a year after its discovery, the Bavarian Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments in July 2022 announces the discovery of a very strange figurine. Indeed, German archaeologists do not know of any similar monument either in this region or for the period of the Iron Age in which it would be made, between 800 and 600 BC.
Faced with so many questions, experts can only speculate. According to their first findings, it could have been a cult figure, probably associated with water, and it could have been placed as an offering to prevent a period of drought.
lHallstatt culture
In March 2021, preventive excavations carried out before the construction of the ring road, bypassing the village of Mönchstockheim in the Schweinfurt district in Lower Franconia (Germany), revealed objects of particular note: many sherds, bones, pottery tools, a very unusual clay stamp and, above all, a rare figurine. The pottery fragments date from the second period of the Hallstatt culture, or the first Iron Age, which extends from the 8th to the 5th century BC. (from -800 to -450).
The Hallstatt culture, corresponding to the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, replaced the so-called urn-field culture in Western and Central Europe. It takes its name from a lakeside village located in the Austrian Salzkammergut region, southeast of Salzburg, where more than 1,300 graves with numerous artifacts have been found. Thanks to these richly decorated tombs, we know that there was then a local elite. Excavated objects also indicate that trade relations since that time have spread to Tuscany, Greece and even the Black Sea.
More than a year after its discovery, the Bavarian Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments in July 2022 announces the discovery of a very strange figurine. Indeed, German archaeologists do not know of any similar monument either in this region or for the period of the Iron Age in which it would be made, between 800 and 600 BC.
Faced with so many questions, experts can only speculate. According to their first findings, it could have been a cult figure, probably associated with water, and it could have been placed as an offering to prevent a period of drought.
lHallstatt culture
In March 2021, preventive excavations carried out before the construction of the ring road, bypassing the village of Mönchstockheim in the Schweinfurt district in Lower Franconia (Germany), revealed objects of particular note: many sherds, bones, pottery tools, a very unusual clay stamp and, above all, a rare figurine. The pottery fragments date from the second period of the Hallstatt culture, or the first Iron Age, which extends from the 8th to the 5th century BC. (from -800 to -450).
The Hallstatt culture, corresponding to the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, replaced the so-called urn-field culture in Western and Central Europe. It takes its name from a lakeside village located in the Austrian Salzkammergut region, southeast of Salzburg, where more than 1,300 graves with numerous artifacts have been found. Thanks to these richly decorated tombs, we know that there was then a local elite. Excavated objects also indicate that trade relations since that time have spread to Tuscany, Greece and even the Black Sea.
Clay figurine found in Mönchstockheim, Bavaria, made in one piece.. © Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (BLfD)
A figurine brought from the Balkans?
It was this remote region that the chief curator of the Bavarian Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments Stephanie Berg thought about when she looked at the first photographs of the statuette. But the track turned out to be “completely fake,” she now claims in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Archaeologists have never seen such a figurine in Bavaria with “a filigree face and ears pierced five times each.” But clay figurines of this style with the same holes at the level of the ears were found in Bulgaria. However, they date back to the 5th millennium BC. Is it to be understood that the figurine found in Bavaria was an import?
In the Archaeological Museum of Varna (Bulgaria) you can really admire a terracotta head with an aquiline nose and two ears, each of which is pierced four times. Characteristic of the Gumelnitsa-Kojadermen-Karanovo culture that developed in the northeast of the Balkans, it dates back to the 5th millennium BC and was found in the famous necropolis of Varna.
The head was found in the Varna necropolis. © Mark Ashman / CC BY SA 4.0 / Wikimedia
The National Historical Museum in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, exhibits other figurines similar to the Bavarian figurine. They also belong to the Neolithic period and were formed by the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (approximately -5500 to -2750 BC), which then occupied the Carpathian region to the Dnieper, which today corresponds to Ukraine and northeastern Romania, all located north of Bulgaria.
Figurines of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture on display at the National Historical Museum in Kishinev (Moldova). © Christian Chirita / CC BY SA 3.0 / Wikimedia
However, carbon-14 dating of a piece of charcoal and a grain of burnt wheat found next to a statuette found in Bavaria indicates a much later origin: between the 8th and 6th centuries BC. This forces Stephanie Berg to reconsider her original hypothesis and admit that “this type of design was invented in different places, independently of each other”, as she admits to the Munich daily. It then remains to interpret the figurine, examining its craftsmanship and the context of its discovery.
Three quarter view clay figurine discovered in Mönchstockheim, Bavaria. We distinguish a slightly hooked nose, the nose of a “water bird”. © Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (BLfD)
woman in a headdress
Archaeologists are not entirely sure, but suggest that the figurine represents a woman. With a refined texture, it was sculpted as a single piece. In its current form, its height is 19 centimeters, but it was originally supposed to be about ten centimeters longer. Because he has no legs, and especially the front part of his bust is torn off, which makes it impossible to unambiguously determine his gender.
After airbrushing, then drying, her face finally appeared; it is easy to distinguish two orbits for the eyes, nose, lips, to draw a mouth and a protruding chin. Only the holes punched into the sides of his head could then serve as clues: they could ultimately represent a headdress adorned with metal rings.
This headdress was a women’s accessory in the Iron Age, as we know from the burials of the Hallstatt culture. Therefore, Bavarian archaeologists suggest that the figurine depicts a woman and perhaps even a deity associated with water. The slightly hooked nose is also reminiscent of how waterfowl were then represented, the curator elaborates.
This wealthy woman from the Hallstatt culture (c. -550 BC) wears a headdress adorned with metal rings. Reconstruction on display at the Natural History Museum in Nuremberg, Bavaria. © Dadero / SS BY-SA 1.0 / Wikimedia
Canal as a sacred place
The figurine and other found objects were indeed located in the deepest place of the water channel, where, undoubtedly, the inhabitants of the Iron Age came to live. “You can imagine that at that time people considered this particular place in the landscape to be a sacred place,” Matthias Pfeil, director of the Bavarian Historic Preservation Office, explained in a press release. From the lack of polishing of all ceramic objects, archaeologists conclude that they were deliberately placed in the same place where they were discovered 2500 years later. If they were brought to this place by the current, they would indeed bear traces of change due to hydraulic action.
Thus, Stephanie Berg suggests that the figurine could represent the goddess of water. It is even possible that it was placed there as an offering to prevent drought, she adds. Because there are no more traces of water in the ground above the channel, which means that the stream has dried up. Thus, residents who came to fetch water from this place could put down a figurine to ask for divine help when they were deprived of a source of supply. But since the figurine was not immersed in water, it seems that this request was not heard…