Hauskirchen
Inhumation Cemetery
450 - 550
In the west of the village of Hauskirchen, on a slope slightly sloping to the southwest in the Vogelberg district, there was a gravel pit in which Longobard graves were discovered between 1965 and 1967. The site is located in the eastern part of parcel 1050/3 of KG Hauskirchen, VB Gänserndorf, about 1,3 km W-S-W of the church of Hauskirchen and about 0,56 km S-E of cot 230 of the Rainberg, north of the railroad line from Mistelbach to Hohenau an der March. As early as 1965, an unknown number of inhumation graves were destroyed during excavation work in the gravel pit, but no further attention was paid to them. Some finds were handed over by the landowner to the secondary school teacher Hermann Kölbl in Hauskirchen (Strayfinds 1965), but a legally required report to the Federal Monuments Office was not made. Mr. Kölbl monitored the site from then on and recovered finds from three inhumation graves (Grave 01-03) in 1966. It was only at this time that he reported to Prof. Herbert Mitscha-Märheim, who was staying in Ebendorf near Mistelbach, and handed over to him the finds recovered up to that time. This time, too, no report was made to the Federal Monuments Office. Mr. Kölbl was merely asked to keep an eye on the excavation work and to inform Prof. Mitscha-Märheim if any new graves appeared. A report to the Department for Archaeological Monuments of the Federal Monuments Office was not made until June 11, 1967. Even before that, however, further graves must have fallen victim to the sand construction; a clay vessel found in the overburden (Strayfind 1967) was handed over by H. Kölbl at the beginning of the archaeological rescue excavations. Between June 12 and 14, August 14 and 18, and October 16 and 27, 1967, the Department of Archaeological Monuments recovered Graves 04-20 . A continuous investigation was impossible because of the differently cultivated fields adjoining the sand pit in the S-E and the continued sand construction in other places. Despite the excavation of large areas after the recovery of Grave 20, no other burial shafts were observed. The burial ground must therefore be considered exhausted. All the skeletal material, including that recovered from Graves 01-03 by H. Kölbl, ended up in the Anthropological Department of the Natural History Museum in Vienna. The strayfinds in 1965 and the finds from Graves 01-03 were handed over by H. Mitscha-Märheim to the Institute for Prehistory and Early History of the University of Vienna (now the Institute for Prehistory and Historical Archaeology) in autumn of 1966, but the hump bowl with Inv. No. 9.762 was not handed over until 1967. The inventories of Graves 04-20 are kept in the Prehistoric Department of the Natural History Museum Vienna (hereafter: PA, NHM Inv. No.). During the archaeological work in 1967, sporadic Ha-C period pottery sherds were found in the humus, but without encountering any concrete features. Only after a new report in July 1968, relatively far away from the Longobard graves, two larger Ha-C-period economic pits could be investigated.
AustriaExcavationHauskirchenInhumation CemeteryMigration PeriodTHANADOS