Neolithic Settlement on the Swabian Alb,
Sponsored by:
National
Science Foundation
Student funding opportunity: Support from the National Science Foundation allows us to cover all costs (airfare, housing & meals) for 6 undergraduate students and 1 graduate students during the 2007 season (July 18 - August 16). Follow link below to apply.
Click here
for application (PDF) for NSF-supported undergraduate student participation.
For fullest consideration, apply by March 23, 2007.
Click here to read a 1-page summary of the NSF proposal.
The Archaeological Research Project
More Information about the Field School
The Archaeological Field Course in
The three and a half
week course will be based in the small town of
Program
dates:
The overseas component of the program will begin in
This course offers training in archaeological methods in a
research environment. The field course is part of a long-term research project
on Neolithic settlement of upland and hill areas of southern
The Swabian Alb is a karst region that in the present day has no
surface water and somewhat poor agricultural soils. For this reason it is
certainly not a typical location for early Neolithic settlement. Work by
amateur archaeologists and our own previous survey and test excavation, however,
shows abundant evidence of Neolithic activities. These include areas with many
chipped stone artifacts and debris from stone tool-making found on modern
plowed fields near natural outcrops of the local Jurassic chert. Swabian
Jurassic chert, a naturally available stone, was the major raw material used
for making stone tools in the Neolithic, and it is found only up on the
limestone plateau, not in the surrounding lowlands where Neolithic farmsteads
and villages are more common. The primary aim of our project is to learn more
about Neolithic activities on the Swabian Alb – did Neolithic people live
and farm here, or did they only make short visits to obtain chert? Did they
collect chert from loose sediments on the surface, as we can do from plowed
fields today, or did they dig to get more chert from the underlying sediments
or limestone? Did Neolithic people carry away whole blocks of stone for
transport to lowland sites, or did local people make tools, possibly for trade
with lowland groups? Chert mining from this period has been documented in
nearby
The
Archaeological Research Project
The NSF-supported research project is a collaboration
between the
In test excavations in 2006, we uncovered large pits filled
with settlement debris dating to the Middle Neolithic. They included ceramics,
possible daub from house walls, and very abundant evidence of stone tool
manufacture. This suggests that at least by this time, Neolithic people had
established settlements on the Swabian Alb. We also found earlier Neolithic
(LBK) ceramics in one of our test excavations in 2006. Perhaps most
interesting, our test excavations during 2006 also showed evidence of a good
deal of landscape change since Neolithic times on the relatively gentle,
rolling Swabian Alb plateau. We conclude this because the Middle Neolithic pits
were buried beneath a thick layer of redeposited sediment (up to 90 centimeters
thick) washed down from upslope. Many artifacts were also found in the
redeposited sediment, indicating that other parts of the site have been
destroyed by erosion.
During the 2007 season, we will carry out test excavations
at several dense surface artifact scatters where geomagnetic survey indicates
there may be buried pits and other features. We will also work with geologists
from the
Click here to read more about
the project in www.jungsteinsite.de,
an online publication (Knipper et al. 2005).
Dr. Lynn Fisher, University of Illinois-Springfield
(project co-PI)
Dr. Susan Harris, University
of California, Santa Barbara (project co-PI)
Corina Knipper,
M.A., University of Tübingen
(project co-PI)
Dr. Rainer Schreg, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum,
Mainz (project co-PI)
Dr. Harald Floss,
Dr.
Linda T. Grimm, Oberlin College
Dr. Miriam Haidle,
Dr. Petra Kieselbach,
Dr. Peter Kühn, Geology Department,
Dr. Arno Patzelt, Terrana Geophysics
Prof. Dr. Thomas Scholten, Geology
Department,
To learn more about
the field course, click here.
For information about eligibility and NSF
support for undergraduate students, click here.
For further
information, contact:
Lynn Fisher
Associate Professor, Anthropology
Sociology/Anthropology Program
University of Illinois at Springfield
1 University Plaza, MS UHB 3010
Springfield, IL 62703
(217) 206-7938
fisher.lynn@uis.edu
This
page created by L. Fisher.
Last modified 4 January 2007.
fisher.lynn@uis.edu