Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (2.1972/1975)

A 6000 YEAR OLD PLOUGHING IMPLEMENT
FROM SATRUP MOOR

By

Axel Steensberg

During the last 350 years remarkable finds from
prehistoric times have been revealed in the for-
mer Danish Duchy of Schleswig, the southern
part of the peninsula of Jutland, once the home-
land of the Angles who invaded Britain in the
Migration period. In 1639 a girl found the first
of two magnificent golden horns on her way to
church, and in 1734 the other - incomplete -
horn was found at the same place. Both were
richly decorated and amongst the reliefs were
also two human figures with shurthandled scy-
thes in their right hands, probably representing
gods of fertility (Steensberg 1943, 110). In the
19th century a complete ship was excavated
from Nydam bog, and in the 20th century
Bronze Age garments have been found as well
as a great number of tools and weapons in the
rich soils of Schleswig.
In the 1950s Professor Hermann Schwabedis-
sen excavated a site in the Satrup Moor bog
near the small hamlet of Rude in Anglia, which
is now a part of the West German state of
Schleswig-Holstein (Schwabedissen 5-28). One
of the layers was dated to the Ellerbek-Stufe
(i. e. Danish: Erteb011e Culture) by means of
pottery, and in this layer Schwabedissen re-
vealed a number of wooden tools amongst which
were two complete “spades” and a third one,
the shaft of which had been broken off and
thrown away (fig. 1-4). The Erteb011e Culture
can roughly be dated by means of the calibrated
C-14 method to the end of the last millennium
before 4.000 B. C., i. e. the transition from
Mesolithic to Neolithic in this region. The
finds were treated by preservative liquids in the

laboratory of the “Schweizerisches Landesmu-
seum” in Zurich, and the wood looks as fresh
as if it had been cut some few years ago.
In May 1965 I paid a visit to the “Schleswig-
Holsteinisches Landesmuseum fur Vor- und
Friihgeschichte” at Gottorp Castle in Schleswig
where the spades are exhibited. The staff of the
museum kindly allowed me to handle the two
complete “spades”. Because of my former edu-
cation as a practical farmer I observed that
there were slight impressions or grooves in the
surface of the shafts in which my hands and
fingers were conveniently bedded. This fact
seemed to provide an exceptional opportunity
for making experiments with replicas in order
to find out for what purposes they had been
made. By courtesy of Professor K. Kersten,
head of the museum, I had the two complete
spades transported to Copenhagen for exact
examination and in order to have copies made
of the specimens in the laboratory of the
Danish National Museum.1
It proved difficult to find wood which had
not been dried artificially, but after several
failures I found two planks of ash-wood stored
on a loft at Lethreborg Manor. These planks
proved to be without cracks and faults right to
the centre of the wood. However, because of
reorganisations in the laboratory the copies
were only finished in April 1973.2
Examination of the Original Finds.
I. The short “spade” or shovel. The short
complete specimen (fig. 1 and 2) was made of
ash, the shaft and the central part of the blade