I do find it amazing that even in a place like Germany with excellent state-level surveying and archaeology services, as well as at least two centuries of enthusiastic amateurs, there are still undiscovered castles lurking in the forests...
It is not that somebody suddenly stumbled upon this castle. It was mentioned in an inventory book from 1454 and in another book form 1596. Also local field names indicated a castle. It is quite common in such cases that there are a couple of canidates for the location of a castle mentioned in a source. It required a thorough excavation to substantiate such a hypothesis.
> there are still undiscovered castles lurking in the forests
As with all anthropology/archaeology, there is a big difference between “discovered” [by science] and “known” [by the locals]. The locals most certainly know of every castle and even those castles that are now ruins probably have local legends/stories of how there used to be a castle in such and such place.
But none of that counts until an archaeologist/anthropologist comes and writes it down. They then bombastically proclaim to have discovered a thing! (that all the locals already knew about for decades/centuries)
Sauce: my partner studied anthropology and this was a running joke in her program. It is very rare for an academic to be the first to discover anything. Usually they get tipped off by someone local who doesn’t count
While there can certainly be case where items of local knowledge haven't been cataloged by (recent) science, I think that you are giving far too much credit to that side. It's not as if there was much oral tradition going on with ancient stories passed on from generation to generation, that just doesn't happen all that much in a place that had print media or better for half a millennium.
What we do have is knowledge encloded in place names ("Burgstall"), but locals won't be any wiser about the history of the thing unless they happen to be the type of person who collects and consumes books written by local history science buffs of earlier generations.
A chance discovery like this usually happens when some known (usually to science far more than to locals!) but not recently disturbed site has to make room for an infrastructure project and the archeologists are sent in to make use of the last chance to see.
You are right. The details are usually more known to science than to locals and infrastructure/building projects spur many archaelogical digs in Europe. To the point that most projects have to budget an archaeology time delay because you’re always going to hit something.
My comment was about completely undiscovered ruins/sites. Those are rare. Someone somewhere (could be a notebook) usually knows about it.
As for “no oral traditions in a country with long-standing books” – the Brothers Grimm famously started writing down oral traditions in the 1800’s. That’s only 200 years ago :) For a long long time in most of europe nobody bothered to write down what the peasants have to say.
Yeah, completely undiscovered does not happen, with the exception perhaps of battle sites which seem to keep catching archeologists by surprise. What does happen is discoveries of the kind "so we dug up this old thing, because it's in the way of some project, and we discovered that it contains identifiable traces of something much older that we did not expect."
The concept we both seem to be tiptoeing around is the idea that the best conservation approach is leaving it in the ground, for future archeologists to explore or not explore. I believe that this is a central principle of the modern approach to archeology, and one we laymen struggle to really take in. Yes, there are many sites known to science, but not analyzed to destruction by science.
"Burgstall" is not a place name, but technical terminology for a location of a former castle of which almost nothing is left. See: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgstall
In the case at issue here, the rock was called "Burgstein" and the forest around it "Burgholz". This names were already mentioned in a book from the 15th century and a book from the late 16th mentions a castle at the "Burgstein".[1] All this was long known,[2] but not all experts were convinced, that there had indeed been a castle on the rock. The new excavation now makes it seem even more likely.
[2] For example, one Gottlieb Fri[e]drich Rösler wrote in his "Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte des Herzogthums Wirtemberg" (2. Heft, publ. 1790): "Auf dem Burgstein einem grossen Felsen gegen Abend, auf dem die Aussicht nocht schöner ist, sind auch die Spuren der alten Burg unkenntlich geworden ..." ("On the Burgstein, a large rock towards the Evening [the West], where the view is still more beautiful, even the traces of the old castle have become unrecognisable ..."). See p. 81 of: https://books.google.de/books?id=BY05AAAAcAAJ&printsec=front...
There aren't. I'm guessing you live in a country with vast tracts of wilderness like the US or Canada. Germany is not like that.
This archeological site is a pile of rocks that once was a castle. (The rocks are probably mixed with dirt and plant life and might have been completely buried.)
As the other replies have pointed out, there aren't really undiscovered castles.
But I do recommend visiting Germany, where there are way, way more castles than you might expect. In particular I can recommend the "Castle Way" along the Neckar River. Every bend in the river has its own castle, just dozens and dozens of them.
Most are not especially dramatic. Many are just ruins; others are literally just people's homes now. Still, it's a little bit like a D&D fantasy world where there really are just castles everywhere. (And yeah, some of them have genuine dungeons.)
Lived in a small town along the Jagst river for a while, which joins the Neckar at Heilbronn. You get Castle Fatigue fairly quickly with how many castles there are around there. Its hard to care about the 15th castle you pass in as many minutes. And I grew up in Ireland, which itself has a lot of castle dotted around the place.
More like living on a body of water was like having access to a highway. And while a lot of trade happened along a river, it's also a risk for invasion from armies and raiding parties, hence the need for protection.
Tour guides of historical sites are often completely or even willfully wrong about facts like this, but in a sense almost all castles exist to exert control over nearby resources so they're probably right.
It's probably both. Rivers are convenient for transport, which means raiders can also target them since so much valuable stuff is transported that way. A castle is a sensible way (in those times) to put a protective force in place against the raiders. However, the castle and the people protecting river traffic need money, so of course that comes from tolls.
It's no different than any "protection racket" or police force: the money has to come from somewhere to offer protection, so some form of tax is normally used.
There is an immense number of dilapidated castles, keeps, strongholds or oppida all over Europe, with most of those barely visible to an untrained eye, and they have been catalogized for decades.
I’m sure there are several ruins of castles in the Saxon/Bohemian Switzerland region. It’s a vast area full of rocky terrain and old ruins might be hard to find without scientific equipment.
