Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Heilbronn - Museum im Deutschhof

You have probably guessed it right, the building you have seen in the last post is the Museum im Deutschhof and is the archaeological and historical museum of the Heilbronn area. This is the view from the back side and the actual Deutschhof:


I don't want to bore you with loads of archaeology, although it is a really nice museum and you can see some fine artefacts there. This, for example, is not a modern sculpture but rather a fossilised tree:


I also quite liked the silver coins which were mostly replicas of Roman coins; produced in the 5th century and reworked to pendants. They looked quite nice, don't you think?


They also showed the production of threads from different fibres that were used in Neolithic times, here philyra (Tilia bast fibre):


A quite spectacular object was the reproduction of a salt furnus in which brine was evaporated in so-called briquetage (special pots for salt production). Salt was a very precious exchange good in the Iron Age and in Heilbronn there was a salt spring which was extensively used to produce the 'white gold'.



The definite highlight however, is the exhibition of the Thalheim massacre. In 1983, a mass grave of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) was found in Thalheim near Heilbronn. 34 bodies of men, women, and children were killed and discarded an a simple mass grave, 7000 years ago.



The victims had traumas caused by blows with blunt instruments like one of these axes or adzes:


which then looked like this (the skull is a reproduction; the original one is in the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart):


they even made a life like reconstruction of one of the victims:

And children visiting the museum, can happily play with the not so happy inhabitants of the small settlement from Thalheim:


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