Using recently uncovered fragments,
archaeologists may be able to
finally piece together one of the
world's oldest works of art
For more than 70 years, archaeologists
have been piecing together the "lion
man" out of mammoth ivory fragments
unearthed in a southern German cave.
The figurine is currently on
display in the City Museum of Ulm, in
Germany.
(Lion-man statuette, Inv. Ulmer Museum Prä Slg. Wetzel Ho-St. 39/88.1, Photo Thomas Stephan, © Ulmer Museum)
On August 25, 1939, archaeologists working
at a Paleolithic site called Stadelhole ("stable
cave") at Hohlenstein ("hollow rock") in
southern Germany, uncovered hundreds of
mammoth ivory fragments. Just one week
later, before they could complete their fieldwork
and analyze the finds, World War II began. The team was
forced to quickly fill the excavation trenches using the same soil
in which they found the ivory pieces. For the next three decades,
the fragments sat in storage at the nearby City Museum of Ulm,
until archaeologist Joachim Hahn began an inventory. As Hahn
pieced together more than 200 fragments, an extraordinary
artifact dating to the Aurignacian period (more than 30,000
years ago) began to emerge. It was clearly
a figure with both human and animal
characteristics. However, only a small
part of the head and the left ear had
been found, so the type of creature it
represented remained a mystery.
Between 1972 and 1975, additional
fragments from excavation seasons
in the 1960s, which had been stored
elsewhere, and still others picked up
from the cave's floor, were taken to the
museum. Yet it took until 1982 for paleontologist
Elizabeth Schmidt to put the
new pieces together with Hahn's earlier
reconstruction. Schmidt not only corrected
several old errors, but also added
parts of the nose and mouth that made
it clear that the figurine had a cat's head.
Although the artifact is often called
Lowenmensch (the "lion man"), the word mensch is not specifically
male in German, and neither the gender of the animal nor
of its human parts is discernible. Five years later, to conserve
the figurine, the glue that held it together was dissolved. It was
then carefully put back together, revealing that only about two
thirds of the original had actually been recovered.
This changed in 2008, when archaeologist Claus-Joachim
Kind returned to the site at Hohlenstein. Kind removed
the old backfill from the hastily concluded excavation of
1939. Over the next three years, Kind's team found several
hundred more small mammoth ivory fragments. "In 2009,
when we found the first ones, it was a huge surprise," says
Kind. "But this is exactly the spot where the fragments of
the figurine were originally found, so I
knew right away that some belonged to
the lion man. It had clearly been damaged
during the earlier excavations. Only
the larger pieces were collected and the
smaller ones left behind," he adds. Kind
was able to fit several of the new pieces
to form part of the back and neck, and a
computer simulation of the lion man was
created, showing the placement of several
more previously unattached fragments.
"At the end of the 2011 season, all the
backfill will have been removed. There
will be no more pieces left," says Kind.
"We hope that the lion man will finally
be complete."
Jarrett A. Lobell is executive editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
