Tollense field school - Part 7
Weblog
During the first two weeks of August 2022, students from Leiden University, University of Rostock and University of Göttingen have joined the Tollense field school to research an archaeological site in the Tollense Valley in northern Germany. The Cultural Heritage Agency participates in this field school to support capacity-building of a younger generation maritime archaeologists and to facilitate international knowledge exchange. In these series of blogs, students and partners tell about their experiences. Read more about the international field school and the Tollense valley in the first weblog. In this edition, student Lotte Wever explains her research of the human remains that were found.
As a Masters student at the Faculty of Archaeology, specializing in human osteology, I have been able to handle and analyse a fair few sets human remains. Most of the materials we usually study are from medieval contexts and the ones with evidence of trauma are rare. This makes the experience I got with the Tollense Valley remains, dating to the early and middle Bronze Age, incredibly special to me.
Our main focus area of the field school was the study and preservation of the dugout/logboat that was presented in one of the earlier blogs. However, another key find category at the site of Weltzin 21 is human skeletal material. Previous excavations have resulted in at least 160 individuals and over 14.000 bones. As such, we knew what to look for while excavating the dugout.
Lifting the remains
On our first day, we were pointed to a spot in the Tollense river that was known to have an in situ skull and several other loose bones in the riverbed. One team of divers carefully excavated these by wafting away the sand, another team dove with camera equipment to create a 3D model and the last team carefully lifted the remains from the riverbed (see also the blog of Jaume). In the following days we discovered many more bones, some from animals, but many from humans.
During my two weeks at the field school in the Tollense Valley, I was in charge of the processing and documentation of these remains. This job already starts in the field. To best preserve the bones, they were kept in a container or bag filled with river water, away from any sunlight. After that, the bones were airdried for several days (depending on the Summer heat) in one of the sheds available to us. Documentation included entering the finds in the database, including the GPS-coordinates of the findspots and photographing the finds. Lastly, we made sure the skull and other bones were carefully packaged for transport to the LAKD (Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege in Mecklenburg- Vorpommern) for further documentation and future research. One of these researches will be my thesis for Leiden University.