Neolithic collection

It was at the beginning of the Neolithic period that the first settlements arose. The first crops and domestic animals came to Europe from the Near East via the Balkans. In our region the first farmers settled in Lower Austria around the middle of the 6th millennium BC. The oldest Neolithic settlement excavated to date by archaeologists from the Department of Prehistory is located in Brunn am Gebirge.
 

Contact: Dr. Walpurga Antl-Weiser


The Neolithic collection at the Natural History Museum contains finds stretching from the Early Neolithic cultures to the Bell Beaker Culture at the end of the Neolithic period. All in all the collection comprises roughly 250,000 individual objects. The most important parts of the collection include the outstanding finds from Brunn am Gebirge, whose oldest pottery can be compared with that of Early Neolithic cultures in the Balkans, and numerous objects from the Middle Neolithic period discovered in Wetzleinsdorf in Lower Austria. These objects include a rich variety of human and animal sculptures from the Middle Neolithic period, most of which were found in Wetzleinsdorf. As with the Palaeolithic collection, there is also a large number of objects from the Karst caves of Moravia. The most famous collection find from the Middle Neolithic Age is a female figure on a throne excavated in Pazardžik, Bulgaria.
 

 

Dating from around 4000 BC, the gold discs and solid copper objects from Stollhof in Lower Austria are the oldest Early Copper Age metal finds discovered in Austria.
 
The largest Late Neolithic finds in the prehistoric collection come from the settlements in Mödling/Jennyberg, Vienna Ober St. Veit and Ossarn, as well as the large collection of Alpine pile dwellings, which have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
 
The richly decorated copper axe from Lušice in Moravia and the bell beaker finds from Laa an der Thaya bring the Neolithic collection to a close from a chronological point of view. The oldest prehistoric amber object ever discovered in Austria comes from a Bell Beaker Culture grave found in Laa a.d. Thaya.
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