Brunn 3 and Schwanfeld

Common features in the ceramics and housebuilding of the earliest Milanovce phase sites in Austria and Germany

Abstract

The Brunn 3 site in Austria and Schwanfeld in Germany belonged to the Early Linear Pottery culture. Their complexes with archaic ceramic types place them among the earliest sites, which followed exactly after the Formative phase. Both sites had rare common shapes of pottery and decorations as well as buildings with similar trapezoidal floor plans. House 16 of the settlement of Schwanfeld and house 38, site 3 of the settlement of Brunn am Gebirge can rightly be addressed as architectural twins due to their architectural similarities. The phenomenon of identical houses over long distances is presented for the first time in this study. A special feature of house 16 of Schwanfeld is certainly the so-called founder’s grave, which was a male individual, who is addressed by the excavators as a hunter or warrior due to his equipment (Lüning, 2011, 5). This is a special burial within a large pit with a very early date of 5484 calBC (Lüning, 2011, 5). Interestingly, there are also certain parallels to houses of the Formative phase of Brunn am Gebirge, which are located in the area of site 2b. One of these houses, house 11 of Brunn, dates to 5525-5453 calBC (Stadler & Minnich, 2021, Table 9.2) and shows clear parallels to the house neighbouring of house 16 of Schwanfeld, which is house 15. Besides comparable radiocarbon dates, which of course have to be treated with a certain caution, similarities in pottery decoration and shapes, and architectural design also play an important role, which makes a coincidence very unlikely. That is why we connect the origin of the Schwanfeld site with the migration of the Linear Pottery culture people from the Vienna Basin.