Palaeolithic sites in Willendorf in der Wachau

Seven sites, nine layers, one world star: the site where the famous Venus statuette was found is one of the most important excavation sites from the Palaeolithic period for archaeologists.

The "Venus of Willendorf" - a statuette of a woman around 11 cm tall and almost 30,000 years old with lavish forms - has made the small Wachau village of Willendorf world-famous. However, little is known about the archaeological context of the find and the Paleolithic site itself.

Start of the excavations

The first finds were made in Willendorf in 1889 while quarrying clay for bricks. However, the major discoveries were not made until 19 years later, when Stone Age finds were unearthed at a total of seven sites during the construction of the Wachau Railway as a result of major earth movements. The Venus site, number 2 in the official census, is located on a loess spur at the mouth of the Willendorf stream into the Danube and was apparently repeatedly visited by Stone Age hunter-gatherer groups over a long period of time. Archaeological excavations began in 1908 under the direction of Josef Szombathy, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and continued until 1927. In 1955 and most recently in 2006, re-excavations were carried out as part of research projects by the University of Vienna.

The site

The loess deposited as drift sediment during the cold periods forms a 6 m high layer at the site, in which at least nine cultural layers are visible as black-brown bands. The lowest two layers are just over 40,000 years old and could date back to the Neanderthal period. This would be the only known open-air site from this period. The two cultural layers above can be assigned to the Aurignacian, the oldest phase of the Upper Palaeolithic (40,000 to 29,000 years old), on the basis of the stone tools.

The finds from layers 5 to 9, which are around 29,000 to 19,000 years old, belong to the Middle Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian). The Venus of Willendorf comes from layer 9, and excavations have repeatedly revealed the remains of sunken hearths and evidence of tents or other dwellings. Apparently the site was repeatedly used as a base camp during the Ice Age winter, as evidenced by the remains of wild horses, reindeer, ibex, but also wolverines, bears, cave lions and mammoths.

Tip: The Venusium in Willendorf provides information about the site and the excavations. The original Venus is in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.