Nienbüttel - ,the richest cemetery in Eastern Lower Saxony'

• Applicants: Dr. Melanie Augstein; Professor Dr. Hans-Jörg Karlsen
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 253136839

For more than 100 years the urns and grave gifts of the cemetery of Nienbüttel, rural district of Uelzen, have been stored unprepared in the archive of the State Museum of Lower Saxony at Hanover. The secondary literature of the past decades has repeatedly stressed the exceptional significance of this necropolis from the Late Pre-Roman Iron Age and Early Roman Iron Age. Gustav Schwantes, the digger, already recognized its extraordinary quality very early. What is outstanding about this necropolis is the big share of weapon burials, known from no other cemetery of this era, besides hitherto unique ritual deposits of weaponry as usually documented for weapon sacrifices of later times. Except for the inventories of two graves and some single objects, among them primarily the almost two dozens of Roman metallic vessels, the finds have not been published yet, thus being inaccessible for further scientific analysis.The project aims at presenting a complete catalogue of the graves based on the original excavation diaries and additional finds from the archives and, based on ceramic finds, at establishing first statements on a more exact dating and the spatial development and intensity during the approximately 250 years of existence as a necropolis. For the first time, this excavation site is granted the value in the research on the Roman Iron Age that equals Nienbüttel's true scientific potential.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants