Das frühmittelalterliche Gräberfeld von Pottenbrunn, Niederösterreich

The present anthropological section concerning the “Early medieval burial field at Pottenbrunn, Lower Austria” covers 199 skeletons (49 men, 51 women and 98 children), the overwhelming part of which have been very well preserved, thus permitting detailed morphological and metric investigations. The individual metric data is summarised on an enclosed CD-ROM, thereby making it available to other authors. In addition, attempts are made at comparisons with skeleton series from the early middle ages and at intraseries and interseries analyses. A comprehensive evaluation of the dental status of the children and adults provided important information. Thanks to close collaboration with the archaeologists, it was also possible to evaluate other themes: These are demographic data, which provided important information about the order of the deaths and sizes of settlements, secondly the evaluation of the depths of the graves and the burial gifts in terms of the sex of the buried person, providing interesting conclusions about social status, and finally the orientation of the graves in terms of the season in which they were occupied. The findings of animal bones were not determined by the two authors, who, however, evaluate their distribution around the grave field.