Steinzeit Siegsdorf in the Chiemgau, Bavaria, is a small site for museum education. It offers tourists, museum visitors and local inhabitants a “bonus” to the next-door “Siegsdorfer Naturkunde & Mammutmuseum”; where the museum offers a history based on science, at Steinzeit-Siegsdorf the offer is to try out and make things yourself. About 20% of the visitors are pupils in school groups.
Starting point is the Südostbayerische Naturkunde- und Mammut-Museum Siegsdorf. There you can find a skeleton of a cave lion (47,000 BC) which carries traces of flint knives. The small exhibition of the most worth mentioning Stone Age findings (a mixture of originals and casts) gives some insight to the history of south-eastern Bavaria. On the premises at the museum the so called Stone Age Garden is run. There are a series of different action places where the visitors are invited to try out different Stone Age techniques, e.g. wall painting in the artificial cave, twisting cords of bark, using flint for drilling holes or making arrow heads. On Thursdays in the summer season the Stone Age Aunty is in the Stone Age garden and presents more Stone Age techniques, especially fire starting, flintknapping and baking bread in a clay oven. The buildings in the Stone Age Garden have no scientific background whatsoever and only serve as props and shelter against bad weather. Besides the pure Stone Age offers one can grind and polish stones, dig for semiprecious stones and throw willow wreaths over the Ice Mans spear as well as over the antlers of a giant deer and the trunk of a mammoth. The Stone Age Garden is an open air offer especially to families and pupils to put hands on the Stone Age topic. The garden is easily accessible by car, bus and train. SteinZeit Siegsdorf is financed by the local municipality.
