Building Archaeology at the Ruin of the Benedictine Abbey of Limburg an der Haardt
Final Report Abstract
The ruins of the Limburg (Haardt) monastery church are among the largest and highest quality examples of early Romanesque sacred architecture north of the Alps. The foundation stone was laid in 1025 by the future Emperor Conrad II at the same time as that of Speyer Cathedral. As a columned basilica of the “Roman type”, the abbey church can almost be seen as an architectural counter-design to the pillar basilica of Speyer Cathedral. However, insufficient research into the abbey church prevented a more precise assessment. The largely hypothetical reconstructions were contradictory even in very fundamental questions of the building's design. The last survey from 1953 fell far short of comparable studies and was never published. Since then, research into the building has stagnated, while the often unfounded assumptions in the secondary literature have become entrenched. The influence and dependence of one of the most ambitious building projects of this era has therefore remained unclear to this day. In the course of the DFG project, it was possible to record and analyze the entire building fabric of the monastery church in detail, which made it possible to clarify numerous fundamental problems in the history of the building. For example, some of the particularly controversial older assumptions could be classified as confirmed for the first time on the basis of the building archaeological evidence, while others turned out to be misinterpretations. This includes the question of the shape of the lost western parts of the building and the crossing tower as well as the differentiation between the church and pre-church period walls in the area of the crypt. Numerous building and craft techniques could be documented in detail on the ruins, from stonework, joint mortar, backfilling techniques and scaffolding to interior and exterior plastering and whitewashing, which is important for the building industry and the technical history of the early Romanesque period, as observations of this quality and density are no longer possible on any other building from this period. Methodologically, it has been shown that modern imaging surveying techniques make it possible to document a building of this size with high quality and precision at low personnel, financial and time costs. For building archaeology, it can be concluded from this that the focus of working methods will shift even further from manual surveying and documentation work to IT-supported evaluation, which is to be welcomed in view of the extremely limited personnel and budgetary resources available in the preservation of historical monuments.
