HisToriEs of ArcHAEologicAl PrAcTicEs

Transcription

H ist o rie s o f Arc h a e o log i ca l P r a ct i ce s
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H i s t o r i e s o f a r c hae o l o g i c a l p r a c t i c e s
r e f l e c t i o n s o n m eth o d s , s t r ate g i e s a n d
s o c i a l o r g a n i s at i o n i n pa s t f i e l d w o r k
e d. o l a wo l f he c he l j e n s e n
T H E n at i o n a l h i s to r i c a l m u s e u m , Sto c k h o l m . St u d i e s 2 0
i s b n 9 7 8 -91- 8 9176 - 47- 8
H ist o rie s o f Arc h a e o lo g ic a l P r a ct i ce s
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National Historical Museum
box 5428
114 84 Stockholm
www.historiska.se
Cover illustrations
A geometrical map drawn in 1693 illustrating monuments in Tolg parish, Småland, Sweden.
Source: Fm 53, The Royal Library, Stockholm. Two photos of archaeologists on their way to
an excavation, taken by Berit Wallenberg in 1928. Source: Image database (nr. bwb12018 &
bwb12019), Swedish National Heritage Board, Stockholm.
© 2012, the authors
English revised by Judith Crawford
THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM, STOCKHOLM. STUDIES.
Main editor: Fredrik Svanberg
Graphic design: Thomas Hansson
Printed by NRS tryckeri, Huskvarna, Sweden 2012
i s b n 9 7 8 -91- 8 9176 - 47- 8
H ist o rie s o f Arc h a e o log i ca l P r a ct i ce s
c o n te n t s
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT......................................................................7
A THEMATIC AND THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION to histories
of archaeological practices
Ola Wolfhechel Jensen........................................................................................................9
FOR THE SAKE OF MEMORY. Practicing archaeology in early modern Silesia
Dietrich Hakelberg............................................................................................................53
FROM AUBREY TO PITT-RIVERS. Establishing an archaeological survey
standard for the British Isles
C. Stephen Briggs...............................................................................................................81
PRACTICE AND PROFESSIONALISATION. The role of field
methods in the formation of the discipline of archaeology in Sweden
Åsa Jensen & Ola Wolfhechel Jensen.......................................................................... 115
DIG THAT! How methodology emerged in German barrow excavations
Gisela Eberhardt.............................................................................................................. 151
“TO RANSACK THE WALL WOULD GIVE TROUBLE AND WOULD
WASTE TIME”. Hillfort archaeology in Saxony in the 19th century
Susanne Grunwald.......................................................................................................... 175
EDUARD PAULUS THE ELDER (1803–1878) and the archaeological
survey in Württemberg
Frauke Kreienbrink......................................................................................................... 191
EXCAVATING AN IDENTITY. British fieldwork in the first half of
the 20th century
Julia Roberts..................................................................................................................... 211
THE SHAPE OF HISTORY. To give physical form to archaeological
knowledge
Jarl Nordbladh................................................................................................................. 241
DECOLONISING PRACTICES? Some reflections based on the Swedish
archaeological expedition to Rajstan in India 1952–1954
Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh........................................................................................... 259
SWEDISH CONTRACT ARCHAEOLOGY in the 1950s and 1960s
Björn Ambrosiani............................................................................................................. 305
THE AUTHORS................................................................................................................ 325
INDEX OF NAMES......................................................................................................... 327
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D ie t ric h H a kel b e r g
FOR T H E S A K E OF M E MOR Y
P R A C T ICING A RC H A E OLOG Y IN E A RL Y
MOD E RN SIL E SI A
D i et r i c h H a k e l b e r g
IN T RODUC T ION
Ransern (Rędzin) on the Oder (Odra) River was an estate that had belonged
to the city of Breslau (Wrocław) since the 16th century. Its economic basis was
the exploitation of the river and its floodplain. Cultivation of arable land, pastures and woodland required maintaining control over the meandering river
and its annual floods (Wendt 1899:11–40; cf. Leonhard 1893). It was following
a severe flood on 15 April 1614 that a hill near Ransern was levelled in order to
build a higher dam.
While labourers were digging up the sandy hill, a large quantity of pottery
and sherds came to light (cf. for the findspot Demidziuk 1998:300, Nr. 2). It
is unknown who recognised the curious finds as man-made artefacts worth
preserving and that they might be of interest to certain scholars in the city.
The news reached Breslau, probably through one of the administrators of the
estate who also served as a city magistrate. What we do know is that a number
of the Ransern urns were subsequently housed in the library of the St. Maria
Magdalena Church in Breslau, which was also associated with a Latin school
(Major 1692:24–25; Kundmann 1726:42). The Magdalenean library was located
in a room with a Gothic ribbed vault above the church’s sacristy. The Silesian
clergyman and historiographer Friedrich Lucae (1644–1708) from Brieg (Brzeg) recounted in 1688 his impression of the interior of the library:
Besides the great number of books, there are only few antiquities and rarities on
display. Most remarkable are the ancient earthen pots in which paganism deposited
the ashes of the dead and cremated bodies beneath the soil, and which were discovered and excavated in 1614 at the village of Ransern near Breslau, as well as at Trebnitz near Oels, and are also kept here for the sake of memory. Some of them have a
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narrow neck and a wide body, others a smaller one; some have only one handle, others two; in terms of hardness, however, they are all about the same1 (Lucae 1689:636;
cf. Garber 2005:556–568. For the interior of the library, see Wiese 1924).
By emphasising the collection of such pagan urns in a library for the sake of
memory (“zum Gedächtnüß”), Lucae also refers to the ambiguous meaning
of prehistoric pottery in the early modern period. Such artefacts established
memory in two ways: by calling to mind the fleetingness of life and the omnipresence of death, on the one hand, and by focusing attention on the pagan
ancestors who were doomed to eternal perdition because of their idolatry, on
the other. In this way, pagan urns served as an admonition for the Christian
present. Archaeological practices in early modern Silesia have to be understood within the aspect of memory or “Gedächtnüß”.
A ‘ L A NDSC A P E OF E RUDI T ION ’
The lands of Silesia in the very east of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation were part of the Catholic Habsburg monarchy since 1526, and
displayed an almost unequalled political, confessional and dynastical diversity.
Reformation and confessionalisation split the political and cultural life. As a
result of the Edict of Restitution from 1629, many scholars had to leave their
homes for confessional reasons, and the Jesuits were intensifying their educational engagement. Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, all Protestant
churches were closed, with the construction of three Protestant Friedenskirchen being conceded. It was probably the conflict-laden coexistence of various
dominions and confessions that resulted in a productive cultural life, because
men of letters and scholars found a very diverse field for their activities within
a limited geographical space and with support from various patrons. Cultural
life, however, was inspired by humanism which was politically attractive to the
principal sovereigns and spread by the urban Latin schools.
The humanist perception of the country, of its history, wealth and erudition
was informed by the moral values and representation culled from history and
led to a very rich literary production. Regional studies flourished in Silesia
and were mostly undertaken by Lutheran and Calvinist scholars with the aim
of demonstrating the cohesion of the country under Catholic threat, and of
maintaining regional as well as confessional identity through its intellectual
layer (Garber 2004:294; Fleischer 1978). In this way, the five Silesian principalities represented a very typical ‘landscape of erudition’ (“Bildungslandschaft”)
along the Oder River, with Breslau as its capital and cultural centre. There
was no university in Silesia until 1702, when the Jesuits founded the Breslau
university, but the Lutheran Latin schools in the cities, such as the gymnasia
at the churches of St. Maria Magdalena and St. Elisabeth in Breslau, offered
a curriculum nearly approaching that of a university (cf. Ludwig 2003:78–82).
These Latin schools produced a number of extraordinary scholar-poets, including Martin Opitz (1597–1639), Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664) and his son
Christian Gryphius (1649–1706), to mention only a few. Libraries were crucial
for these educational institutions, or in the words of the time: “Books belong to schools, and libraries belong to scholars; otherwise these would be like
a soldier without a rifle, or like a fortress without an armoury” (Kundmann
1741:327).2
The Breslau libraries, associated with the churches of St. Maria Magdalena,
St. Elisabeth and St. Bernhardin, had grown through the donations and bequests of influential citizens. They held a wealth of manuscripts and printed
texts, many of them representing regional history and literature. The libraries
were however not only textual resources for a humanist education, but also
places of extensive non-book collections (cf. Houszka 1998; Jencquel 1727:253–
258). Thus the Breslau church and school libraries also provided supplementary
texts which were required for understanding the wealth of natural and artificial objects in their holdings (cf. Jencquel 1727:6).
There were, of course, no Roman ruins or inscriptions in Silesia, like those
in Southern Germany. In spite of this, native archaeological finds from Silesia
aroused scientific curiosity as early as the 16th century. The reasons for this can
only be examined in a wider cultural context, which was influenced by the
philological, theological and medical education of the scholars and, last but
not least, by their religious attitudes. What is most remarkable is that quite
a few Silesian scholars had a strong interest in archaeological finds, and that
this particular interest was apparently more intense in Silesia than in other regions of the Holy Roman Empire. As a micro-historical feature, this deserves
further study in terms of a more contextual understanding of archaeological
practices in the early modern period. If one is aware of the fact that early
modern scholars were mostly trained as theologians or physicians, and that
the practice of archaeology was merely one of their scholarly and professional
pursuits, this poses problems for the history of archaeology: Why were these
scholars digging and collecting, and how were they going about it? What was
the motivation behind this?
The investigation of the history and places of archaeological practices in
Silesia within the early modern erudite community is dependent upon the
source situation. Manuscript material related to archaeological finds or practi-
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ces in the early modern period is generally very rare and difficult to find. The
letters of scholars who produced publications about archaeological finds, and
might also have corresponded with others about these, have either not survived, or mention of archaeological discoveries was seldom made in scholarly
correspondence. One reason for the latter would be the universal scientific
approach of the time, when the observation of archaeological phenomena was
only a comparably small facet in the study of regional and natural history. Although the meagre source situation might reflect the marginality of archaeological practices within early modern science, it must be noted that even the
few concrete pieces of evidence found their way into print. Printed texts provide information as to how archaeological interests were embedded into early
modern scholarship. Emphasising this special issue may appear highly artificial, but it turns out to be a rather promising approach to viewing a particular
scientific practice without neglecting the context of early modern natural philosophy and regional studies.
After describing the earliest excavations in Silesia, I would first like to argue that the scientific interest in archaeological finds displayed by certain
scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries was initially stimulated by the collections
of the Latin school libraries, which were established in the 16th century. Secondly, I shall address field practices and practitioners creating archaeological
knowledge. Finally, the meaning of ‘pagan’ pottery and its function in establishing memory will be discussed in order to understand the incentives of archaeological activities.
E X C A V A T I n g , COLL E C T ING A ND P UBLIS H ING
B E FOR E A RC H A E OLOG Y
In the 16th century, Silesia became famous for the finds of ‘earth pots’ (“Erdtöpfe”) or “pagan burial pots” (“heidnische Totentöpfe”), which enjoyed considerable interest among members of the house of Habsburg. “Collecting”
in general has even been described as a “Habsburg practice” (Bredekamp
2007:35–39; cf. Rauch 2006). Ferdinand I (1503–1564, emperor from 1558) was
the first of the Habsburgs to found a cabinet of curiosities in Vienna (Distelberger 1985). When he was sojourning in Breslau in 1546, Ferdinand entrusted
Otto von Neideck with the support of any searches for and the excavation of
pots believed to have grown in the earth and found near Trebnitz (Trzebnica).
Ferdinand demanded that some of the pots be sent to Vienna (Franz 1936:142).
In 1577, Rudolf II (1552–1612, emperor from 1576) ordered an excavation of pagan urns on the Glücksberg at the village of Greisitz (Gryżyce) near Sagan
(Żagań) at which he and his brothers, Archdukes Maximilian and Matthias
(1557–1619, emperor from 1612), were present. With his own hands the emperor
cleaned the first piece of pottery found, and eventually had a wooden column
erected to commemorate this event. Matthias returned to Greisitz in 1611 to
try his luck again, but failed to find anything.3
In 1595 Breslau officials ordered the captain of Muskau to excavate little pots and to send them to Breslau, because the emperor (then Rudolf II)
wanted to have them. It was also Rudolf II who in 1605–1606 commissioned
Burggraf Wilhelm von Dohna to have his subjects excavate pots in Muskau;
all the finds, including a ceramic rattle in the form of a goose, were brought
to Breslau (Zaunick 1930:94). From this excavation, 32 vessels of all sizes can
be traced in the inventory of Rudolf II’s “Kunstkammer” in Prague (Bauer
& Haupt 1976:58). Prehistoric pottery from Silesian sites had already before
1596 also found its way into the famous cabinet of curiosities established by
Archduke Ferdinand II in Ambras Castle, near Innsbruck in Austria (Franz
1936:142; cf. Rauch 2006:134).
The Habsburg interest might be traced back to the earliest excavations
known from Silesia, initiated by townspeople near Trebnitz north of Breslau,
already before the middle of the 16th century. Evidence comes from a letter
written on 31 January 1544 by the wealthy Breslau merchant Georg Uber (d.
1572) to Andreas Aurifaber (1512–1559). Born in Breslau, Aurifaber initially
studied theology with Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg University where
he became a dean in 1543. In 1544 he studied medicine at the universities of
Leipzig and Padua, before being appointed professor at the University of
Königsberg in the duchy of Prussia in 1545. Uber’s letter must have reached
Aurifaber early in his medical studies. Like many physicians of the time, he
would have been generally interested in natural history and particularly in the
possibility of subterranean earth growths. In 1551 Aurifaber published a small
text about Baltic amber, identifying it as subterranean bitumen, rather than
tree resin (Sachs 1997). These interests might have been the reason that Uber
sent Aurifaber news about recent excavations of pagan urns at the “Töppelberg” (“mount of pots”) in the village of Massel (Masłow) near Trebnitz in the
duchy of Oels (Oleśnica).
To the physician Andreas Aurifaber, &c. from Georg Uber S. D.
Concerning the pots and little vessels that are being excavated.
Hear about the few pots from Trebnitz, which I have seen myself and [the information of ] which I have shared. The findspot outside of Trebnitz is primarily
sandy, like a little hill, and is located near the village of Massel. Our people call it
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the Töppelberg, the heir of which is the landholder Maslowski, who has named himself after the place, like most of the Polish nobles are accustomed to do. The citizens
come here on Whitsun to recover their souls, if the tedium and surfeit of the city
have caught hold of them, and they give some coins to the peasants, who, equipped
with spade and mattock, dig a circular pit from which they eventually extract an almost moist little pot, soft and very delicate, with sandy soil and various implements.
It becomes hard if it is gradually exposed to the air and remains there, and it continues to harden from its soft condition. More than once, I have myself seen charcoal,
burnt bones, bronze and iron implements, coated with rust, which I have thereupon
shown to gold- and blacksmiths, so that they could report if they knew the purpose
of these implements, or rather fragments. However, none was to be found among
them who could shed even the least light upon these fragments, in as much as they
were affected by age and rust. I do suppose that here was a burial of pagans who did
not use [real] urns, while they collected ashes, fire and the relics of implements from
the pyre in the pots as a sign of piety, and buried them in the sand in the middle of a
mound. As long ago as these pots may have been produced, they have been softened
in the humid soil by the constant moisture and [tend to] return to the elementary
nature from which they were made, and unless they are taken out with due care, you
will [only] have loam and clay for each pot. If you act more carefully and diligently
in the matter of taking out the urns, they harden in the air through dryness and keep
their pristine nature, as they have been formed by the potter. If Your Excellency can
explore anything thereof better and more accurately, I will not be opposed to it, in
fact, I will appreciate it with gratitude and I will exert myself seriously to send Your
Honour something that has been collected by the townsfolk near Trebnitz from the
pagan graves, or, how our people call it, from the Töppelberg, if not in this winter,
then certainly in spring. With this letter, I wish Your Honour and your spouse and
your whole family the best of health. Done at Breslau, on the last day of January, in
the year 15444 (Scholz von Rosenau 1592:390–392).
The site had obviously already been known for a while. Uber leaves no doubt
that the urns were man-made artefacts and appears to be very well informed
about the archaeological circumstances. He describes the excavation of pagan
urn burials in the countryside as a pastime engaged in by Trebnitz citizens on
Whitsun, although carried out for them by local peasants. Uber also gives Aurifaber practical advice in how to excavate urns, and he mentions having asked
gold- and blacksmiths for their advice concerning the interpretation and even
restoration of the recovered fragments of bronze and iron implements.
Uber’s original letter to Aurifaber appears to have been lost already in the
th
18 century, but its text has survived in a printed collection of learned letters
on medical opinions and observations edited by the Breslau physician Laurentius Scholz von Rosenau (1552–1599) (Scholz von Rosenau 1592:390–392).
Many humanist scholars maintained extensive letter collections, which were
gathered and bound into large tomes (cf. Garber 2005:550–551). Georg Uber’s
original letter about the Massel excavations, or a copy of it, may thus well have
come into Scholz’ personal possession, perhaps via his father-in-law Johannes
Aurifaber (1517–1568), the brother of the addressee (Fleischer 1979:34). Scholz
himself was a collector of plants and curiosities and the owner of a very famous
garden where the political and learned elite of Breslau gathered. He also owned
a female Egyptian mummy that was later sold to the pharmacist Christoph
Krause, who traded in mumia for medicinal purposes. The mummy was later
examined by the well-known poet Andreas Gryphius in 1658, who had studied
medicine at Leiden University in the Netherlands (Gryphius 1662; Kundmann
1741:366; Śliwa 2003). In 1727 the mummy came into the possession of the library of St. Maria Magdalena, where it joined native archaeological finds, like
the Ransern urns (cf. Houszka 1998:18–19).
Shrewd printers in the 16th and 17th centuries disseminated broadsheets
about miraculous events, such as human and animal monsters, weather anomalies, comets and other phenomena observed in the sky. Although archaeological discoveries appear to be virtually absent from the subjects covered, an
engraving of the Ransern urns was made for a broadsheet relating the story of
their discovery. Printed in Latin, this broadsheet was certainly addressed to an
erudite audience, to scholars, teachers and students (Cunrad [1614], Fig. 1).
D[eo]. O[ptimo]. M[aximo]. S[acrum].
[To God, the Best and Greatest.]
Many things become revealed by God and time. Listen, posterity, although you
are still in the future. There is a village called Ransern located on the banks of the
Oder River, in the jurisdiction of the illustrious city council of Breslau, one mile
from the city. Because the village was endangered by the annual floods of the said
river, it was deemed necessary by the administrators that the place be protected
by a higher dam. While this was being implemented and some thousand loads
of soil from a nearby hill were being carried away, (lo and behold!) fragments of
earthen pots were discovered in the bare sand, which at first remained unheeded
and were thrown away. However, because more and more such pots were found,
indeed a significant quantity, they were excavated more carefully and put aside.
They are apparently urns in which, as a rule, our pagan ancestors, who were not
yet converted to Christianity, used to bury the ashes of the burnt corpses in the
sand, following a strange piety. These vessels, however, of which similar ones were
hitherto also found in Silesia, for instance in Trebnitz, Lübben, Masselwitz, Crossen and elsewhere, amply reveal that they were not grown thereat, nor were they
left after use by dwarfs, but were man-made and fired, although not covered with
a lead glaze, and even though their external shape was adorned with grooves and
lines, they are of an adequately firm hardness. Some are larger, others smaller, and
the rest of medium size, all of them have a narrow neck and a wide belly. A few
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have a single handle, others have two. They were excavated on April 15, in the year
after the nativity of our Redeemer 1614. You, mortal, whoever you are and when
you are reading or looking upon this, [always] remember the fragility of human
life, in true piety and faith in God, which makes you ready to follow the path of all
flesh, so that you shall live in eternity,
LIVE IN THE MEMORY OF DEATH
C[aspar]. C[unrad]. D[octor].
The text is typeset within an ornamental border printed from an engraved
copperplate. The border is made up of tendrils, which entwine 16 pieces of
prehistoric pottery of all sizes, and resembles the ornamental border, framing a
contemporary epitaph in a church. Careful hatching creates the impression of
shadow and light, revealing the engraver’s intention to display the physicality
and capacity of the prehistoric vessels, which are all drawn to scale. A scale in
inches is placed in front of the largest vessel.
The text was composed by the Breslau municipal physician Caspar Cunrad
(1571–1633), who had been crowned poet laureate in 1601 (Flood 2006:395–396).
He was a friend of Martin Opitz and one of the central figures of Silesian late
humanism. With a network of over eight hundred contributors to his project
of a collection of short poems, Cunrad may have been well informed about
regional curiosities throughout Silesia. Although the broadsheet is not dated,
it almost certainly first appeared on the occasion of the discovery of the urns in
1614. It is noteworthy that, on the one hand, Cunrad reports about the curious
story of the discovery, its circumstances and historical interpretation of the
urns, yet on the other hand, his text clearly conveys a moral message.
Cunrad’s broadsheet was reprinted in 1667 by Elias Major (1588–1669), rector of the St. Elisabeth gymnasium since 1631 (cf. Flood 2006:1233). While the
original copperplate was used again for printing the ornamental border, the
text had to be reset. The occasion for the reprint remains unclear, and Major’s
name also does not appear in the imprint.5 Yet an entry in Elias Major’s personal almanac for 1667 makes it clear that he had obtained the old copperplate
from the library at St. Maria Magdalena on 22 August. He then published 100
copies of the broadsheet, of which 25 were given to the magistrate of Breslau
Fig. 1. Broadsheet concerning the Ransern discovery, text by Caspar Cunrad, Breslau [1614].
It was reprinted by Elias Major in 1667 using the same copperplate. Engraving, platemark: 39
x 26.9 cm. Courtesy of Wrocław University Library: 56065, olim 2 W 19, 385. Provenance:
Library of St. Bernhardin’s Church, Breslau.
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via the secretary Johann Kretschmar.6 In spite of the obviously small print
run, at least one copy of each edition has survived in the holdings of Wrocław
University Library (Cunrad [1614]; Cunrad 1667).
Elias Major’s re-edition of the broadsheet, referring to the Ransern discovery over fifty years earlier, is revealing for archaeological practices emanating
from the school libraries. Elias’ son Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) attended
the St. Maria Magdalena gymnasium. He, too, would undertake archaeological activities in the course of his academic career, and it is probable that he became acquainted with the Ransern urns during his time at school. Like many
Protestant Silesians in the early modern period, Johann Daniel Major initially
attended the University of Wittenberg (1654) and then went to Italy in 1659, to
the University of Padova, where he graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1660.
From 1665, he was professor of practical medicine at Kiel University.
In 1676, Johann Daniel Major copied three of the Ransern urns from the reedited version of Cunrad’s broadsheet and produced a woodcut for publication,
but it was not printed until 1692 in Major’s influential book Bevölckertes Cimbrien
(Colonised Cimbria). Major pointed out that the Ransern urns had been given
to the Magdalenean library “for eternal memory” (“zu stets-wärendem Angedencken”), and he again related the history of their discovery in 1614 (Major
1692:24–25). The Bevölckertes Cimbrien was in fact a history of prehistoric settlement on the Jutland peninsula, focussing on the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein in
Northern Germany. Major argued that the ancient people of the Cimbri would
not have migrated from Prussia over the Baltic Sea, but from Middle Asia through the Baltic lands, Finland and Sweden southwards to Jutland. Since he
could not solve the historical problem due to the lack of written sources, Major
emphasized monuments in the landscape and archaeological finds from the soil
as historical evidence, employing a rather systematic archaeological approach
through excavation and documentation. Because of the discoveries of urn burials in Silesia, Brandenburg and Poland, Major felt confident that the Cimbri
had also traversed these lands in the course of their migration.
The collections at St. Maria Magdalena were later considerably expanded
by school rector Christian Stieff (1675–1751) with prehistoric pottery found
at Liegnitz, Lübben, Rauden, Pilgramsdorf, Wiltschütz, Massel, Schmiegel,
Pilsnitz and at other Silesian sites (Fig. 2. Kundmann 1726:42). Stieff, who
had studied from 1697 to 1702 at Leipzig University, was in charge of the library from 1717, before moving to the St. Elisabeth gymnasium in 1734 (Flood
2006:2000–2002). In order to earn a living in Leipzig, he supervised the revised and augmented edition of Nikolaus Henel von Hennenfeld’s (1582–1656)
Silesiographia, reissued by Michael Joseph Fibiger (1657–1712). This was a voluminous regional study of Silesia based on Henel’s extensive manuscript annotations of the much smaller first edition from 1613 (Henel von Hennenfeld
1704). Because Michael Joseph Fibiger, the learned prelate of the Catholic
beadhouse of St. Matthias in Breslau, had no urns at his disposal with which
to address the burial customs of the ancient pagan inhabitants of Silesia, Stieff provided him with information in a letter (Stieff 1737:68–69). De Vrnis In
Silesia [...] Epistola (Letter on urns in Silesia) was published in 1704 as the first
account of this subject (Stieff 1704).
In the course of his archaeological studies, Stieff was also the first to again
come across the 1544 letter from Georg Uber to Andreas Aurifaber, edited in
the collection of medical letters published by Laurentius Scholz von Rosenau
in 1592. Stieff published it again in Fibiger’s Silesiographia renovata (Henel von
Hennenfeld 1704:735–736). In the epistola to Fibiger, he explicitly acknowledged the humanist instauration of the sciences that had freed the pagan urn
finds from the hands of the mob and from oblivion. Moreover, Stieff argued in
favour of bringing archaeological finds from the past back into present memory, and dated the urns to the Common Era:
However, I did not want these remnants of the fatherland’s antiquity, which have
spent thirteen, fourteen or fifteen centuries inside the earth, to be hidden any
longer, but decided to reveal them to daylight, freed, as it were, by their return from
the inconveniences of obscurity and oblivion (Stieff 1704:fol. 2 verso).7
At the beginning of the 18th century, Uber’s seminal letter from 1544 was no
longer commonly present in the memory of the regional scholarly community.
Leonhard David Hermann (1670–1735), a Protestant pastor and collector in
the village of Massel near Trebnitz, was not aware of the archaeological activities of his compatriots more than a hundred and fifty years earlier, before he
read Uber’s letter in Fibiger’s Silesiographia renovata from 1704. Hermann, who
had done extensive excavations on the “Töppelberg” at Massel, remarked that
nobody could have expected to find a letter dealing with pagan urns in a medical work (Hermann 1711:55). However, Uber’s letter was originally addressed to
a humanist and physician interested in all natural curiosities of his homeland.
When Hermann published his regional account of natural and archaeological
curiosities as well as the church history of Massel in 1711, he entitled it Maslographia. This was not only a curious description, but also a praise of his home
village in a humanist tradition. Maslographia was a direct reference to the humanist regional studies Silesiographia and Breslographia by Nikolaus Henel von
Hennenfeld.
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Fig. 2. Places and representations of collecting: Christian Stieff (1675–1751), school rector at
St. Maria Magdalena, amidst his private collections. The pyramidal cabinet on the right for the
Silesian urns (“Schlesische Urnen”) even hides the shelf with the books on theology (“Gottes Gelahrtheit”). Engraving by Benjamin Strahovsky. Courtesy of Wrocław University Library, bound
before 364226, olim 2 E 577.
Leonhard David Hermann had attended school in Breslau at St. Elisabeth,
where even more collections of value were maintained than at St. Maria Magdalena. In 1696, the curator of the ducal “Kunstkammer” in Gotha (Thuringia),
Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel (1659–1707), called attention to “the Breslau holdings of
pagan death burials, urns and so-called thunder-bolts”, explicitly mentioning
“some beautiful urns in the library at the church of St. Elisabeth in Breslau,
which were discovered in the duchy of Breslau”8 ([Tentzel] 1696:648–655).
Hermann seems to have specialised in the construction of representative
furniture for the keeping of natural and archaeological curiosities. He produced
two pyramid-shaped wooden cabinets filled with pagan vessels. These pyramids
were painted and adorned with biblical emblems and epigrams, “for the memory of one’s own mortality” (Hermann 1711:169). In 1704 Hermann donated one
of these cabinets to the collection of St. Bernhardin’s Church in Breslau and to
its rector David Mayer (cf. Stemmermann 1934:91–93, pl. XVII–XIX). Another
cabinet, now displaying minerals and fossils, was donated in 1732 to the library
of St. Elisabeth’s, commemorating the school rector Gottlob Krantz’s affiliation
with the Royal Prussian Society of Sciences.9 The pyramidal shape represented
a durable eternal monument, pointing to the memorial function of the collection enclosed within it (for this see Mencfel 2010). For his portrait engraved by
Benjamin Strahovsky, Christian Stieff chose such a ‘pyramid of urns’, now obviously furnished with glass panes and enabling a view of its contents, together
with a laurel-tree as attributes of his erudition (Fig. 2).
FI E LD P R A C T IC E S A ND P R A C T I T ION E RS
A blacksmith making charcoal was said to have once removed sods from the
“Töppelberg” at Massel. This led to erosion of the sandy soil by wind and
resulted in the uncovering of pagan pottery (Hermann 1711:49). Such initial
discoveries, which occurred everywhere during the course of work in the countryside, seem to have triggered a systematic search for archaeological features
in the landscape. For detecting pagan urn graves hidden in sandy soils, Leonhard David Hermann favoured the use of iron sounding rods. This prospecting technique was still recommended in Silesia in the 19th century (Hermann
1711:110; Luchs 1875:230). The systematic search resulted in a considerable yield;
Leonhard David Hermann alone was said to have excavated more than 10,000
and Christian Stieff more than 3,000 pagan vessels (Kundmann 1737:312).
Georg Uber’s letter from 1544 already gives some insight into the practitioners and into how they went about excavation work in the early modern
period. Peasants in the countryside knew the find spots and were occasionally
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paid by townspeople for extracting ceramics and metal objects from the soil,
using picks (ligones) and spades (palae, for pictorial evidence cf. Hakelberg 2011,
Fig. 2). In order to recover the vessels of a cremation burial more or less intact
and in displayable condition, an excavation technique uncovering the pots in
a circular pit seems to have been employed. Excavating the vessels along with
the area immediately surrounding them (as would be required for lifting en bloc
today) enabled the low-fired ceramics to dry and to harden in the air. It also
kept them in the original relationship to other vessels, to the soil beneath or to
associated stone settings. Thus, the desire to lift unbroken vessels as a whole,
might have led to the recognition of the actual archaeological context.
Scientific curiosity in 18th century Silesia clearly extended beyond the isolated antiquarian objects to be collected. The preparation and cleaning in situ of
the archaeological contexts of the burials was a precondition for their examination, description and drawing, as depicted in an engraving published by
Leonhard David Hermann in 1711 (Fig. 3). Close observation and awareness
of delicate archaeological features were prerequisites for the refutation of interpretations of prehistoric urns as relics of dwarfs, products of subterranean
spirits or as earth growths. Moreover, close observation was also crucial for
the documentation of related archaeological facts, i.e. the excavated as-is state,
the material relationship of artefacts embedded together in the soil. The early
modern perception of the archaeological context also led to the cognition of
the contemporaneity of associated artefacts, like pottery, ash, burnt bones and
charcoal or stones. In this way, the Silesian scholars became very well aware
that an archaeological excavation created empirical facts. However, they did
not only maintain an empirical antiquarian focus, but rather sought to supplement the fragmentary historical sources provided by Greek and Roman writers with material facts from the soil, in order to praise the history of their own
country. Yet it was not possible to determine how distant the pagan past of the
urn burials actually was. The historical terminus ante quem was the Christianisation in Silesia in the early Middle Ages. Consequently, the urn graves were
given earlier datings because of the pagan burial rite.
Excavating and collecting in early modern Silesia appear to have been frequently initiated, if not actually conducted, by trained physicians. Publications
on archaeological finds were produced by the Görlitz physician Ehrenfried Hagendorn (1640–1692); by Samuel Ledel (1644–1717), municipal physician in Grünberg (Zielona Góra); Georg Anton Volkmann (1664–1721), municipal physician
from Liegnitz; and Johann Christian Kundmann (1684–1751), a physician from
Breslau. They all became members of the scientific academies in Halle or Berlin
during the course of their careers (see e.g. Hagendorn 1681; Hagendorn 1686;
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Fig. 3. Prehistoric cremation burials on the “Töppelberg” at Massel (Masłow), documented
in situ and published by Leonhard David Hermann (Hermann 1711). Engraving by Christian
Winkler from Oels (private collection).
Ledel 1684; Ledel 1702; Volkmann 1720:303–327; Kundmann 1724; cf. the biographies in Sachs 1997–2006). The role of physicians as antiquaries has been
generally explained by the empirical approach in early modern medicine, because physicians were more used to “immediate, discrete problems [...] than
complete theories.” (Kenny 2004:241). Clinical and anatomical reports were
written and published as observations, or as case histories. The anatomist’s historia was an epistemic tool, a method straddling “the distinction between human and natural subjects, embracing accounts of objects in the natural world
as well as the record of human action.” Physicians indeed linked the new uses
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of historia, as an “autopsy narrative”, with its reappraisal as antiquarian knowledge (Pomata & Siraisi 2005:1–8). Single observationes on archaeological subjects, sometimes followed by a scholion, can be, albeit rarely, detected among
the bulk of medical observations published in the learned periodicals of the
17th and 18th centuries (inter alia: Hagendorn 1681; Hagendorn 1686; Ledel 1684;
Ledel 1702).
By the second decade of the 18th century, archaeological practitioners from
Silesia, such as the physicians Johann Daniel Major, Georg Anton Volkmann
and Johann Christian Kundmann, the teacher Christian Stieff and the pastor
Leonhard David Hermann, appear to have had established through their activities and publications a set of scientific ‘standards’ for gathering and ordering
archaeological facts. Silesian scholarship spread beyond the borders of Silesia
through the dissemination of publications or, as in the case of Major, by the
relocation or journeys of the scholars themselves.
Johann Daniel Major’s Bevölckertes Cimbrien from 1692 can also be placed
in the tradition of late humanist regional studies that flourished in 16th and
17th century Silesia. It was the first step in the direction of his planned “Opus
Cimbricum”, an extensive regional study of the lands of Cimbria that was to
trace the origins of the Cimbri. The “Opus Cimbricum” was never completed.
Johann Daniel Major died in 1693 while travelling in Sweden and conducting
archaeological studies. As a consequence of Major’s early acquaintance with
humanist regional studies and archaeological finds in Breslau, he was easily
able to combine his archaeological expertise with the innovative methods and
excavation techniques developed by Swedish scholars. It is known that Major
read Olof Rudbeck’s first volume of Atland eller Manheim (Uppsala 1679) in
1680 (Lohmeier 1979:63–64). The Swedish physician Rudbeck argued in favour of the cultural superiority of the North and believed the Scandinavian
Peninsula to be Plato’s Atlantis, with the city of Uppsala as its ancient capital.
He also tried to prove the great antiquity of Swedish civilisation by means of
archaeological finds, employing an ingenious stratigraphic approach. Having
recognised that the accumulation of humus grew thicker with time, Rudbeck
used this sedimentary mechanism for the dating of tumuli by measuring the
thickness of humus layers visible in the section of a tumulus. The dating was
always based on the Biblical chronology, in years after the Flood in 2400 BC.
Rudbeck claimed to have dated more than 16,000 excavated tumuli in this
manner. It was presumably from Rudbeck that Major learned about excavation
as a virtually ‘anatomical’ method of inquiry, a method of uncovering relationships of artefacts and soil layers by means of cuttings, revealing distinct stratigraphic sequences (Eriksson 1994:15–16; Schnapp 1996:200–201, 354–356).
A RC H A E OLOGIC A L P R A C T IC E S IN CON T E X T
Which contextual conditions for archaeological practices in early modern Silesia can be ultimately ascertained? Excavated ‘earth pots’ and ‘thunderbolts’,
prehistoric pottery and stone axes in the modern sense, were anomalies and
irregularities from the soil that required explanation and that posed challenges for natural philosophy. They gave rise to questions of whether they were
subterranean growths, figured stones and lusus naturae, and whether clouds,
thunderstorms and lightnings were able to generate stones in the air. The curious finds seemed to have preternatural causes and can be counted among
the numerous strange and marvellous objects tacitly selected by a “preternatural philosophy”. A random activity of demons causing such objects could
not be ruled out (Daston 2000:17–19, 24–25). This might be the very reason
why the pots were not only explained as earth growths, but also as products
of dwarfs and subterranean spirits. Already in the 16th century, scholars could
detect analogous explanations among uneducated people in the countryside
(Agricola 1955[1546]:167–168; cf. Franz 1931; Prescher 1982). These alleged ‘popular’ explanations were considered ignorant and superstitious by certain scholars, although they surely reflected medieval Arabo-Aristotelian ideas about
the formative strength of the earth producing subterranean growths that still
endured in 16th century scholarship (Zaunick 1930:92–93).
It is remarkable that preternatural explanations played no role at all in our
earliest source, Georg Uber’s letter from 1544, while Caspar Cunrad explicitly
rejected the interpretation of the urns as relics of dwarfs in his broadsheet on
the Ransern discoveries from 1614. Once recognised as man-made artefacts,
urns and stone axes were thought to belong to eerie burial customs of the
ancient pagan inhabitants of the home country, the barbarians known from
Roman and Greek writers.
Humanism and the Reformation in the 16th century gave rise to regional studies of Silesia and can thus also be recognised as preconditions for archaeological
practices, the search for and the collecting of pagan artefacts preserved beneath
soil. Simultaneous with the emergence of the panegyric humanist regional study
praising the Silesian lands (Fleischer 1978), archaeological discoveries like those
on the “Töppelberg” at Massel or the Ransern urn burials came to the attention of the erudite Protestant elites in the Silesian cities. In accordance with
the humanist encouragement to learn moral values from history, archaeological
finds were seen as lessons or admonitions for the present. Provided with moral
significance, prehistoric urns and other pagan artefacts became desirable items
for the collections in the school libraries.
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Except for theologians, hardly any early modern professional group has cultivated such consciousness for the historical constitution of humankind. The
point was to comprehend the ways of God leading humans to salvation (Garber 2008:109). For the most part, the scholars involved in archaeological practices were educated as physicians or theologians, and earned their livings as
physicians, pastors and teachers. They justified their archaeological pursuits by
various means: scientific curiosity praising the fatherland; attribution of religious significance to archaeological finds; inclusion of archaeological finds as
illustrative material in the pedagogy of the time. Consequently, the Silesian
gymnasia and their libraries could become places of archaeological collecting,
while surveys and excavation continued in the countryside. The material culture of the past was kept in the school libraries as well as in private venues
in “Antiquitäten-Zimmern” (rooms of antiquities) for remembrance, curiosity
and as historical evidence. For Silesia, this primarily suggested evidence of the
ancient Lygian and Quadian peoples (Stieff 1737:90). It was the unsatisfactory
historical sources, which were almost silent concerning the pagan inhabitants
of Silesia, on the one hand, and the frequent discoveries of prehistoric urn burials, on the other, that led scholars to focus on collecting pagan artefacts such as
prehistoric ceramic vessels, bronze implements and bronze clothing accessories.
Ambiguous identity issues arose as a result of archaeological discoveries, which
were recognised as relics of one’s ‘own’, but nevertheless ‘pagan’ ancestors.
Pagan antiquities supplied not only historical facts, but also incentives for
contemplation, self-reflection and piety. Particularly during the course of the
17th century, pagan urns increasingly attracted theological attention. Fragile as
they were, they were apt to be associated with the fragility of human beings.
This must be understood in the context of 17th century central European crises,
confessionalisation, the Thirty Years’ War and their impact on everyday life.
The prehistoric urns bore immediate witness to the cremation of the dead, a
practice common among the ancient inhabitants of a land or territory, which
was the subject of humanist regional studies. The pagan urns thus became
an abhorrent ‘alterity’ to the pious Protestant scholar, and supplied attractive
emblematic metaphors. The motto “VIVE MEMOR LETHI” (“Live in the
memory of oblivion [viz. death]”), which concludes Caspar Cunrad’s text on
the Ransern urns (Fig. 1), is a quote from Aulus Persius Flaccus (Satyrae 5:152).
The use of a motto by the pagan poet Persius (34–62), with its exhortation to
enjoy life in the face of death, for the Christian contemplatio mortis appears to
be quite a contradiction (Ludwig 2003:102–103). Persius’ half-verse, set in capitals, in a way represented the subscriptio of the urns as pictura according to the
rules of early modern emblematics. Recalling pagan idolatry and cruelties, the
excavated artefacts admonished the beholder to live piously while always conscious of death, in the belief of God’s promise to resurrect all Christians while
condemning all pagans. Thus, archaeological practices and their results could
even be a manner of Christian consolation. It can be argued that pietism, challenging Lutheran orthodoxy and calling for a deeper belief and renewed piety,
also influenced the reception of archaeological finds in the German Protestant
territories during the final decades of the 17th century (Hakelberg 2011).
For the lower nobility, the antiquities discovered on their lands were occasionally also a source of noble identity, in imitation of Italian humanist models.
When a number of pagan urn burials were found on the feudal manor of the
Schweinitz family in Krain in the principality of Liegnitz, the discovery was
used as an occasion to reprint several funeral sermons on deceased members of
the Schweinitz family ([Schweinitz] 1685:fol. A–B). In the preface, the pagan
urns were not only employed as general metaphors for the fragility of every
human being, but also as a means of establishing noble memoria. Archaeological discoveries were interpreted as divine advice to honour the memory of
the Christian dead in order to save them from oblivion – which is what had
obviously happened to the alarmingly nameless remains of the ancient pagan
inhabitants of the Schweinitz estates. Archaeological field practices were thus
a legitimate expression of scientific curiosity, but also of memoria.
As I have tried to show, archaeological practices were part of early modern science, “a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding,
explaining, and controlling the natural world” (Shapin 1996:3). There is no
indication that Silesian scholars perceived excavating and collecting as an exclusive art or discipline. The detailed antiquarian descriptions and collections
have been placed in the context of the empirical approach of early modern
natural philosophy (Kenny 2004:239–245). In the tradition of humanist regional studies, early modern scholars from Silesia attempted to explore and
understand their homeland, well established in the tradition of the salvation
character of 16th century Lutheran scholarship. Regional studies described the
distinctive natural and cultural wealth of the country in the past and present,
a trove consisting of “Denkwürdigkeiten”, things and events worth remembering or thinking about, curiosities characterising the natural and cultural
resources of a country, as well as its crafts and arts. Among these resources
were also archaeological finds. The excavation and collecting of subterranean
artefacts and fossils represented special techniques that helped gain and order
additional historical or topographical information. Archaeological practices
were an early modern scientific approach to a more distant past, an approach
beyond or supplementing written tradition from antiquity and the Bible, the
latter attesting to the reality of the Flood as a terminus post quem.
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There can be almost no doubt that many Silesian scholars of the 17th and 18th
centuries became interested in excavated objects while attending the Breslau
schools, with the collections of the church libraries in the background. When
the excavated pagan urns from Ransern were deposited in the Magdalenean
library in 1614, the seventeen-year-old Martin Opitz had just enrolled in the
affiliated gymnasium. He may also have become acquainted with the nonbook collections in the library, where his later poetical devotee Caspar Cunrad produced and disseminated the broadsheet about the Ransern discoveries.
While teaching in Weissenburg (Alba Iulia) in Transsylvania in 1622–23, Opitz
collected Roman inscriptions for his planned work Dacia antiqua, which however remained unfinished. In Zlatna, the Roman settlement of Ampelum, he
seems also to have come across Roman pottery and ruins (for Opitz as antiquary, see Bollbuck 2010). Opitz employed the Roman urns with their ashes in his poem Zlatna oder von der Rhue des Gemüts (Liegnitz 1623, verses
63–76) as emblems of vanity, a literary expression of Opitz’ neo-stoic attitude:
[...] Now rest, you great heroes,
And let, since you are silent, the stones tell of you.
Out of your graves sprouts forth now many a flower
And is in full bloom, as was your desire.
Whenever I wander here among you,
And see here the foundation of a house,
And there a burial pot filled with ashes,
As happened only recently, I become conscious of
The vanity of the world, and consider,
How futile it is that many grieve
And martyr themselves day and night, for pale death comes
Before you know it [...] 10
SUMM A R Y
The present article explores the discovery of prehistoric urn burials and the
context of their reception in Silesia (a historical region in Central Europe
located mostly in present-day Poland) from the 16th to the 18th century. At
that time, there were no archaeologists in the modern sense. Pastors in rural
parishes, physicians in the cities or teachers at the urban Latin schools attended to regional studies and also engaged in what is called archaeology today.
Taking this into account, the scientific activities of prospecting, excavating,
documenting and collecting before archaeology became institutionalised in
the 19th century will be termed here “archaeological practices”. In consideration
of the early modern debate on the natural or artificial origin of stone axes and
pots found in the soil, archaeological practices cannot be seen isolated from
natural philosophy. Consequently, I would like to attempt to approach the
early modern scholars from the viewpoint of their own time, their own beliefs
and philosophies, which also means placing their archaeological practices in
the scientific, religious and social contexts of the period. Early modern Silesia
provides a good case study, since an intense interest for archaeological finds
recovered beneath soil developed there as early as the 16th century. Archaeological practices in Silesia will be recognised as a distinctive method within
the framework of humanist regional studies. The result of the mostly unknown
field activities was the collecting of archaeological finds. It has been argued
that archaeological collecting eventually served to preserve the memory of the
pagan ancestors, as well as the Christian contemplation of one’s own death.
A CKNOWL E DGM E N T S
This article stems from the project “Archaeological Practices in Early Modern Silesia” at Freiburg University, Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und
Archäologie des Mittelalters, carried out within the AREA-network (ARchives of European Archaeology) and funded by the programme “Culture
2000” of the European Union. I am particularly indebted to the staff of the
library of Wrocław University, to Harald Bollbuck from the Herzog August
Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, to Krzystof Demidziuk from the Wrocław Archaeological Museum, to Klaus Garber at the Institut für Kulturgeschichte
der Frühen Neuzeit, University of Osnabrück, and to Michał Mencfel from
the Institute for the History of Art at Poznań University, for their kind support or inspiring suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank Howard Weiner
for correcting my English prose. All translations are my own.
N o te s
1. “Ausser der grossen Menge Bücher lassen sich hier sonst wenig Antiquen und
Raritäten sehen. Am merckwürdigsten seynd die alten erdenen Krüge/ worinn das
Heydenthum die Asche der verstorbenen und verbrandten Cörper unter der Erden verwahrete/ welche Anno 1614. bey dem Dorff Ransern im Breßlauischen/
wie auch theils bey Trebnitz im Oelsnischen ohngefehr gefunden und ausgegraben/ auch zum Gedächtnüß hieher beygesetzet worden; etliche derselben
haben einen engen Halß und weiten Cörper/ andere einen kleinern; etliche haben
nur einen Handgriff/ etliche zween Handgriffe/ die Härtigkeit aber betreffende/
so gibt einer dem andern nichts nach.”
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2. “Zu Schulen gehören Bücher, und vor Gelehrte Bibliothecken; sonsten sind diese
wie ein Soldat ohne Gewehr, oder wie eine Festung ohne Zeughauß. ”
3. Wrocław University Library, IV. Qu. 141. [Esaias Fiebing], Extract Der Antiquiteten dieser Stadt Sagan [c. 1615]:fol. 142 verso-143 recto.
4. For the Latin original, in the edition of 1598, see: <http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/192-med-2f-2/start.htm?image=00074> (18 June 2007).
5. For Major’s 1667 editing cf. Wrocław University Library, Akc. 1949 KN 847, p. 186187. [Thomas 1824:interleaved personal copy].
6. Wrocław University Library, R 2366, fol. 119r [mss. entry in Elias Major’s hand:]
“Præcedente septimana ex Cupro in Bibliotheca Magdalenæa asservato, & mihi ad
aliquot dies commodato, imprimi curaveram centum exempla de Urnis Ranserianis. Eorum 25. hodie p[er] Dn. Joh. Cretschmarum Secretarium, Amplissimo
senatui obtuli.”
7. “Nolui tamen vlterius occultare istas antiquitatis patriae reliquias, quae per XIII.
XIV. aut XV. Secula iam intra terrae viscera delituerunt, sed ab vmbrarum tandem
& obliuionis iniuria postliminio quasi vindicatas in solem ac diem exponere apud
animum meum statui.”
8. “[...] von denen zu Breßlau befindlichen heidnischen Todten-Gräbern/ Vrnis und
so genannten Donner-Keilen [...] Es sind ein paar schöne Todten-Gefäße auf der
Bibliothec bey der Kirche zu S. Elisabeth in Breßlau/ welche in ipso Ducatu Vratislav. gefunden [...]”
9. Wrocław University Library, Akc. 1949/674 (olim Cat. 235), fol. 33 recto, lists the
items in the pyramid-shaped cabinet donated by Hermann to St. Bernhardin:
“Die gemahlte Pyramide mit Urnis außgefüllet. In dieser Pyramide Postement
befinden sich im untersten Fache 1 Große Urne zerbrochen | im 2ten Fache |1
etwas kleinere|1 noch kleinere zerbrochen|1 dito kleinere ganz| 1 dito Urne| In
der Pyram. selbst| Im untersten Fache| 1 Eine Urna mit Beinen | noch 2 kleinere|
2 dito kleinere schadhaft| 1 Lampas sehr klein| 1 Urne sehr klein mit e. Dekel| Im
2ten Fache| 2 Urnen| 1 Lampas| Asbest| Im 3ten Fache |1 Urne |Im 4ten Fache| 1
Urne kleiner| Auf dieser Pyramide hangen 2 Strausseneyer. – For the pyramid
donated to St. Elisabeth see Akc. 1949/657 (olim Cat. 59), fol. 56 recto: “1732 den 25
Sept. hat Herr Leonhard David Hermann, Pastor in Massel, [...] gesendet: Eine
von Maßlischen Naturalien zusammengesetzte 4seitigte Pyramide, auf einem
grün- und gold gemahlten Postamentchen stehend [...].”
10. “[...] Nun liegt ihr grossen Helden/
Vnd laßt/ seydt jhr gleich stumm/ die Steine von euch melden.
Auß ewern Gräbern wächst jetzt manche Blume für/
Wie jhr euch dann gewündscht/ vnd steht in voller Zier.
So offt ich hier bey euch mich pflege zu ergehen/
Vnd sehe da den Grund von einem Hause stehen/
Hier einen Todtentopff mit Aschen vollgefüllt/
Wie nechst mir widerfuhr/ so wird mir eingebildt
Die Eytelkeit der Welt/ vnd pflege zu bedencken/
Wie nichtig doch dz sey warum sich manche kräncken/
Vnd martern Tag vnd Nacht/ dann kompt der bleiche Todt
Eh’ als man sich versieht [...] ”
R E F E R E NC E S
U n p u b l i s he d w o r k s
Wrocław University Library
Akc. 1949 KN 847 Thomas, Johann George. 1824. Handbuch der Literaturgeschichte von
Schlesien. Eine gekrönte Preisschrift. Hirschberg: Krahn [Thomas’s interleaved and annotated personal copy].
Akc. 1949/657 (olim Cat. 59) Pro Memoria die der Elisabethanischen Bibliothec gemachten Verehrungen betreffend, 1722–1764 [catalogue of the donations to the library of St. Elisabeth].
Akc. 1949/674 (olim Cat. 235) Altes Verzeichniß der Münzen [catalogue of the collections in the library of St. Bernhardin, probably in David Mayer’s hand, before 1728].
IV.Qu.141 [Fiebing, Esaias] Extract Der Antiquiteten dieser Stadt Sagan. N. Von Ursprung undt Erster erbawung, auch woher sie aÿgentlich diesen Nahmen erlangt, undt bekommen; Item Von fortpflantz- und Bawungen dieser Stadt: Mehr Von den alten Heidtnischen, Pollnischen, Böhmischen, undt Teütschen Regenten, mit wenig eingesprangt- undt
bewehrten Historien Von 900. Jahren anhero beschehen, Vndt sich zue getragen. [Sagan
chronicle, c. 1615].
R 2366 Hancke, Valentin. [1666]. Schreibkalender Auff das Jahr nach Christi Geburt/
1667. Mit Vermerckung etzlicher gewisser Tage/ anwelchen das Ober- oder Fürstenrecht/ so
wol das Königliche Mann-Recht/Stade-Recht [...] in der Kaiser- und Königlichen Stadt
Breßlaw/ pfleget gehalten zu werden [...] Breslau: Baumann Erben durch Johann Christoph Jacob [Elias Major’s annotated almanac, 1667].
P u b l i s he d w o r k s
Agricola, Georgius 1955 [1546]. De re natura fossilium [...] Translated from the First
Latin Edition of 1546. New York: The Geological Society of America.
Bauer, Rotraud & Haupt, Herbert (Eds.) 1976. Das Kunstkammerinventar Kaiser Rudolfs II. 1607–1611. Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien. Vol. 72. Wien:
Anton Schroll & Co.
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Bollbuck, Harald 2010. Imitation, Allegorie, Kritik – Antikenfunde bei Martin Opitz.
In: Hakelberg, D. & Wiwjorra, I. (Eds.) Vorwelten und Vorzeiten. Archäologie als Spiegel
historischen Bewußtseins in der Frühen Neuzeit. Wolfenbütteler Forschungen. Vol. 124. Pp.
311–341. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Bredekamp, Horst 2007. Antikensehnsucht und Maschinenglauben. Die Geschichte der
Kunstkammer und die Zukunft der Kunstgeschichte. Berlin: Wagenbach Verlag.
[Cunrad, Caspar]. n.d. [1614]. Töpffle zu Ransern in einem Berge gefunden. n.p. [Breslau]. [broadsheet].
[Cunrad, Caspar]. 1667. Töpffle zu Ransern in einem Berge gefunden. Wratislaviae.
Denuò exprimebatur Anno 1667. Quintili Mense Medio. n.p. [Breslau]. [broadsheet
ed. by Elias Major].
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HisToriEs of ArcHAEologicAl PrAcTicEs

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