On April 23, 1516, the Bavarian Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) was enacted by Duke Wilhelm of Bavaria. For this reason, "Beer Day" is celebrated every year on April 23. Reason enough to dedicate ourselves to this topic here as well. The at least 6,000-year-old history of the popular barley juice fills countless books and offers an almost unmanage...
…is not only a popular beverage today, but was probably already so in prehistoric times. The first evidence of beer brewing points to the late Paleolithic Natufian period, as suggested by the remains of germinated barley from the Raqefet Cave in Israel (about 13,700 - 11,700 years ago). However, it is not only the potential age of beer that is inte...
The Stone Age was named after the fact that people made tools from stone. But stone is not just stone, but a raw material of varying quality and grade. Thus, it was also a coveted commodity and was transported and traded by the Stone Age people over great distances. Today, archaeology can reconstruct through finds how and via which routes there wer...
The assumption that men hunted in the forests while women gathered food and cared for children is deeply rooted in our conception of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies. But does the empirical evidence really support this version of gender-differentiated work, or is it a fiction of our modern society? Besides archaeological findings, anthropology...
To this day, the image of Stone Age hunter-gatherers persists. Brave men hunt mammoths, and the weaker sex is suitable at best for collecting berries. (It should be mentioned that gathered plant foods were equally important for the nutrition and survival of prehistoric and early historic cultures). This idea dates to the 19th century and is still i...
»Countless feral cattle are rounded up in the steppe by cattle herders. Over hundreds of kilometers they drive them in huge herds to the big cities in the west to sell them there for profit. Some big merchants who organize these herd drives make a fortune in the process.« This account does not describe any aspect of North American history of the 19...
Margaretha Königerin lives a simple life in Michelau in Lower Franconia (Bavaria/Germany). Her husband had already died 11 years before. Then comes the night of June 16-17, 1617. Several men took her out of her house and searched her belongings for witchcraft tools or ointments. The widow, over 50 years old, is put on trial for witchcraft. She imme...
On May 7, 1686, Christian Wilhelm Cronemann entered the place of execution in Kulmbach (Northern Bavaria, Germany). Just a few months ago, he was a respected figure at the court of Margrave Christian Ernst of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. He will not live to see the evening. The rope will be the last distinction he receives from the margrave. As archaeolog...
In the soil of Upper Franconia at the Ochsenkopf mountain – the second highest mountain of the Fichtelgebirge – there is a strip of the rare rock proterobas, about 7km long and only 20m wide, which exists only in this one place in the whole of Central Europe. Proterobas is a fine-grained subvolcanic material that can be melted like glass and has be...
About 300 years ago, several warships meet each other under cannon thunder and enveloped in gunpowder vapor. The brave sailors on both sides work hard to maneuver the ships around their respective opponents and get into firing position. A scene you would expect to see somewhere on the world's oceans? No, it took place in this or a similar way in th...
