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FRIARY - MILL - TANNERYExcavations at the Carmelite friary
in Esslingen am Neckar
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Aerial photo of the excavation
area. |
The
building of an extension to the Esslingen Technical College on a
plot of land directly outside the medieval city centre on the
Kiesstraße, known since the Middle Ages as "Auf dem Kies"
(roughly translatable as "on the banks"), threatened an
area known to have been the site of a Carmelite Friary, founded at
the end of the 13th century. |
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The
efforts of the Baden-Württemberg State Monuments Office to
preserve this area as an archaeological "research park"
for future generations were ultimately unsuccessful, but an
agreement was reached which allowed the archaeologists time in which
to rescue as much as possible. Accordingly, large scale excavations
were undertaken in 1991-92. |
The
excavations were followed with great interest by the general public,
so that the Department for Medieval Archaeology of the State
Monuments Office, Stuttgart, and the City of Esslingen Museum
decided to mount an Internet exhibition about the results as soon as
the post-excavation work was completed. For the first time in
Baden-Württemberg, an attempt has been made to reconstruct the
various building phases with the help of threedimensional
computer-generated images, not forgetting that this is only meant to
provide an impression of how we think things might have been. |