The Avar burial ground in Leobersdorf

A small Avar cemetery tells a lot about the everyday life of the early medieval equestrian people thanks to the abundant grave goods.

The Avars were steppe riders who took over the settlement areas of the East Germanic Lombards from 568 AD - the Carpathian Basin and its foothills of the Vienna Basin. Officially, the Enns was the western border of their area of power. In the early 9th century, the Avar Khaganate (this term is comparable to "empire") fell as a result of targeted campaigns by Charlemagne.

The cemetery in Leobersdorf
With its 171 individuals, Leobersdorf is one of the smaller of the archaeologically excavated Avar burial sites. It probably belonged to a small settlement. Apart from scattered individual graves from the early period, the graves were roughly arranged in rows, as was usual. The women were on average 160 cm tall, the men 170 cm. The skeletons showed signs of various diseases - from joint arthritis to metabolic diseases. There was no evidence of injuries resulting from combat.

Rich grave goods
As in other Avar cemeteries, the dead in Leobersdorf were given grave goods in the form of costume components, weapons, tools and other objects for everyday use. However, the burial sites differed in terms of food offerings; in Leobersdorf it was mainly cattle parts that were placed in the grave. Many graves yielded evidence of wooden fixtures, but these can hardly be described in more detail due to the conditions of preservation. In the best cases, iron coffin clamps were preserved. The posture of some of the dead indicates that they were tightly wrapped (perhaps in a cloth) or tied up.

The analysis of the Leobersdorf cemetery refined our understanding of the development of fashion and thus the chronology of the Avars and thus made a significant contribution to further Avar research.

Tip: The Leobersdorf LEUM (Light Museum and more) provides information about the Avars in Leobersdorf