Gravettian Settlement Patterns in Krems, Lower Austria

This research project, lasting from November 2004 to March 2007, aimed at deepening our knowledge on the life of hunter and gatherer societies of the younger Old Stone Age at the Wachtberg of Krems in Lower Austria. The field work exceeded all expectations concerning find density and state of preservation of organic finds and features. Two excavation campaigns of together 15 months revealed a 27,000 year old settlement and burial site. 18 m of a Gravettian find horizon were exposed in a depth of 5.5 m. In the course of the field work all finds, features and sections were documented by a field computer driven total station with direct laser measurement. More than 66,500 measurements were recorded, including more than 17,000 recovered single objects, of which the majority are lithics and faunal remains. The latter provide evidence for the hunting of mammoth, horse, reindeer, rock goat, brown bear, wolf, fox, wolverine, hare and several bird species, thus reflecting a typical ice age environment. Abundant charcoals hint at more favourable conditions in the valleys. Organic artefacts include tools such as awls and a polisher, as well as personal ornaments like perforated teeth of fox and wolf, ivory beads and ivory pins. Lithic artefacts provide evidence for the entire production chain from raw material to finished tools. "Microsaws" and shaped fragments of fired clay provide connections to the adjacent site of Josef Bayer (1930) and to the famous Moravian sites. Several types of colour substances like red and yellow ochre, haematite, graphite and weathered shell limestone (white) were retrieved. Parallel to the fieldwork the rich find inventory was conserved and preliminarily determined and catalogued. First laboratory results of the analysis of diverse sampling series, being processed in the course of national and international institutional cooperation, are already available. In addition to settlement features like pits and post holes, two burials were unearthed. In 2005 a double burial of newborns was uncovered, situated in a pit underneath the modified shoulder blade of a mammoth. The excellent preservation of the skeletal remains is due to this protective grave architecture. Another burial of an infant, which died at the age of three months, was discovered one meter further north in 2006. An ivory pin found just above the child`s head could have been used to fix an embracing fur. All three individuals had been embedded in red ochre and placed in a flexed position facing east. These are the first burials of the Old Stone Age in Austria, which have been documented and recovered. As the individuals are so young, they are also internationally unique. The careful assemblage of the graves, the embedment in red ochre and the string of ivory beads, which was found in the double burial, reflect esteem and integration of newborns in their society. This had been doubted by the international science community due to a lack of evidence. Further investigation is currently taking place in the Anthropological Department of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. A first scientific report was published in Nature in November 2006; several papers have been presented at conferences.