Bronzezeitliche Hortfunde in Niedersachsen

The author presents 175 hoards of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in Lower Saxony and Bremen he got to know until 2005. Most of them had been published before, but not collected for comparison. In some cases he is able to amend information on find sites, circumstances, and contexts. All complexes are described in detail and subjected to source criticism. The documented hoards belong to two distinct groups, devotional / sacrificial hoards and metallurgists’ / tradesmen’s deposits. In the first case, they usually contain precious unused objects sometimes imported from far away and deposited/sunken at sacred sites [tree, rock, cave, water body]. The spectrum of types hardly changed for more than a millennium [axe, lances, pairs of rings]. In some cases sacrificial deposits can be distinguished from “personal equipment for the afterworld”. Hoards of the second type are far more numerous and can be recognised by containers holding casting moulds, tools, broken items, spoiled and raw castings, and finished products that were deposited at a shallow depth on dry ground. Hoards of broken objects are mostly restricted to the Early Bronze Age.