Monastic Island of Reicheneau - UNESCO: World Heritage

East of the island. In these places the island
provided excellent conditions for the small
fishing, hunting and gathering communities
whose camps, clearly only temporarily and
seasonally inhabited, were distributed over
the more shallow shore areas along Western
Lake Constance. The flint materials found at
these hunter camps at the Lower Lake and
the Überlinger Lake generally show a close
association with the Lower Hegau region
and the Schwäbische Alb, single imported
pieces also show connections with the area
of the Federsee, the Danube and the
Frankenalb. This outlines in part the areas
utilised by the hunters; their relationship to
the foothills of the Swiss Alps and the Alps
Mountains remains unclear to modern
research. This is indeed unfortunate, since
the latest research indicates that already in the
Late Mesolithic, before the establishment of
the LBK-Culture, the earliest impulses for
neolithic developments may have reached
It is only around 3900 BC, when the
Hornstaad Group began to settle along the
lakeshore, that we find positive traces of
settlement on the Island of Reichenau. The
dwellings are situated in the shallow water
zone on the Northern shore near Oberzell, at
395 m above sea level. This
“Pfahlbausiedlung” (pile dwelling) was
discovered in 1902. More recent observations
and findings permit integration into a time
frame. Unfortunately the site has suffered
from heavy erosion so that even repeated
prospecting could not find on occupation
deposit, and barely any remains of the piles
themselves. A few finds from a church
excavation in Niederzell suggest another
occupation site of the same or an
immediately preceding cultural phase
(Borscht Group). These are finds from a nonwaterlogged
site at 399 m above sea level
that cannot be attributed to a
Pfahlbausiedlung (pile dwelling). The
History of Human Occupation of the Island Add. 2
our region from there.
The cultures of the early Neolithic in the
German Southwest (LBK and La Hoguette)
hardly touch the Island of Reichenau, as is
the case with the whole shoreline of Lake
Constance. It is only in the Bohlingen area
that LBK dwellings advance to the edge of
the lake basin, whereas they are well
represented in the Hegau adjoining to the
West. In the course of the Neolithic the
Cultures Hinkelstein, Großgartach, and
Roessen left their traces along the shorelines
of Lake Constance, and the economy of the
Danubian-Central European Neolithic spread
to Central Switzerland and the Alpine Rhine
River. During this period, the first farming
communities may have also settled on the
Island of Reichenau. There is however no
positive evidence of this to date.
Hornstaad Group is well explored by large
scale research excavations at the name-giving
site Hornstaad at the tip of the Hoeri
peninsula. The Group’s dwellings line the
shores of the Lower Lake in dense chains of
settlements, with 2 to 5 km separating
individual villages. Several occupation sites
are situated within sight of the Island of
Reichenau. Eventually, the island became
part of a vast and dense net of larger farming
communities whose villages - by analogy to
the results from Hornstaad - contained 20 -
40 houses. This initial phase of the
“Pfahlbausiedlungen” (pile dwellings) at
Lake Constance is remarkable for the distinct
heterogeneous character of the material
culture with connections to the Upper
Swabian group of the Schussenried Culture,
to contemporary cultures in Alsace, to the
Cortalloid Culture in Central Switzerland, and
remote connections with the Maas River, and
the Danubian and Mediterranean regions. The
2