Züschen (megalithic tomb) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Züschen tomb is a prehistoric

Prehistory

Prehistory is the span of time before recorded history. Prehistory can refer to the period of human existence before the availability of those written records with which recorded history begins. More broadly, it refers to all the time preceding human existence and the invention of writing...

burial monument, located between Lohne and Züschen, near Fritzlar

Fritzlar

Fritzlar is a small German town in the Schwalm-Eder district in northern Hesse, north of Frankfurt, with a storied history. It can reasonably be argued that the town is the site where the Christianization of northern Germany began and the birthplace of the German empire as a political entity.The...

, Hesse

Hesse

Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. Classified as a gallery grave

Gallery grave

A Gallery grave is a form of Megalithic tomb where there is no size difference between the burial chamber itself and the entrance passage. Two parallel walls of stone slabs were erected to form a corridor and covered with a line of capstones. The rectangular tomb was covered with a barrow or a cairn...

or a Hessian-Westphalian stone cist (hessisch-westfälische Steinkiste), it is one of the most important megalithic monuments in Central Europe

Central Europe

Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

. Dating to the late 4th millennium BC (and possibly remaining in use until the early 3rd), it belongs to the Late Neolithic

Neolithic

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

Wartberg culture

The Wartberg culture , sometimes: Wartberg group or Collared bottle culture is a prehistoric culture of the later Central European Neolithic...

. The presence of incised carvings, comparable to prehistoric rock art

Rock art

Rock art is a term used in archaeology for any human-made markings made on natural stone. They can be divided into:*Petroglyphs - carvings into stone surfaces*Pictographs - rock and cave paintings...

elsewhere in Europe, is a striking feature of Wartberg culture tombs, known so far only from Züschen and from tomb I at Warburg

Warburg

Warburg is a town in eastern North Rhine-Westphalia on the river Diemel near the three-state point shared by Hessen, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is in Höxter district and Detmold region...

Discovery and excavation

The tomb was accidentally discovered in 1894. For a number of years, a row of sandstone

Sandstone

Sandstone is a sedimentary rock composed mainly of sand-sized minerals or rock grains.Most sandstone is composed of quartz and/or feldspar because these are the most common minerals in the Earth's crust. Like sand, sandstone may be any colour, but the most common colours are tan, brown, yellow,...

blocks had impeded the local miller from ploughing one of his fields. When he decided to remove them, Rudolf Gelpke, an inspector from nearby Garvensburg castle, noted the unusual presence of sandstone in the area of a basalt

Basalt

Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...

outcrop. On a visit to the site, he recognised it as a prehistoric monument consisting of two parallel rows of regularly shaped vertical slabs. Gelpke erroneously associated the monument with the Chatti

Chatti

The Chatti were an ancient Germanic tribe whose homeland was near the upper Weser. They settled in central and northern Hesse and southern Lower Saxony, along the upper reaches of the Weser River and in the valleys and mountains of the Eder, Fulda and Weser River regions, a district approximately...

, a local Iron Age

Iron Age

The Iron Age is the archaeological period generally occurring after the Bronze Age, marked by the prevalent use of iron. The early period of the age is characterized by the widespread use of iron or steel. The adoption of such material coincided with other changes in society, including differing...

tribe. He convinced the owner of the field to remove soil only from the ends of the row. This revealed bones and pottery sherds. At this point, Wilhelm von Garvens, owner of the Garvensburg, was notified. He, in turn, informed the antiquarian

Antiquarian

An antiquarian or antiquary is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient objects of art or science, archaeological and historic sites, or historic archives and manuscripts...

Baron Felix von und zu Gilsa. After Gilsa's scrutiny, the tomb was excavated, still in 1894, by Johannes Boehlau, former director of the State Museum at Kassel

Kassel

Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...

. Further excavations took place in 1939 and 1949, under the direction of O. Uenze of the archaeological service of Marburg

Marburg

Marburg is a city in the state of Hesse, Germany, on the River Lahn. It is the main town of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district and its population, as of March 2010, was 79,911.- Founding and early history :...

Tomb architecture

The rectangular sunken chamber is 20m long and 3.5m wide. It is built of rectangular sandstone slabs, quarried several hundred meters away. Each long wall consists of a row of 12 slabs, one of which is missing. The narrow walls consist of a single slab each.

A terminal slab separates the tomb chamber proper from a small anteroom of 2.5m length. At the centre of this slab is a perfectly circular hole, the so-called Seelenloch (German for "soul hole"), of 50 cm diameter. This is sometimes assumed to be too narrow as an entrance for the passage of human bodies, in which case it may have served as a symbolic connection between the dead within the tomb chamber and the living, assembled in the ante-room for some ritual

Ritual

A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. It may be prescribed by a religion or by the traditions of a community. The term usually excludes actions which are arbitrarily chosen by the performers....

, perhaps an offering

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...

ceremony. Whether the hole could be closed, like in some comparable tombs in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, is not known. The floor of the anteroom was of densely trampled mud. The presence of non-local stones outside the chamber suggests that it was originally covered by an artificial tumulus

Tumulus

A tumulus is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds, Hügelgrab or kurgans, and can be found throughout much of the world. A tumulus composed largely or entirely of stones is usually referred to as a cairn...

. It is not clear whether the chamber was roofed in stone or some other material (wood).

Human remains

The earth inside the chamber contained numerous disarticulated human bones. Although the minimum number of individuals is as low as 27, the broken and mixed state of the remains suggests severe disturbance. Thus, it is possible that the number of persons buried here was originally higher. The discovery of an Urnfield period burial above the original depositions indicates that the destruction of the grave, disturbance of its contents and removal of the roof must have taken place before the 10th/9th century BC. Charcoal and ashes were found in a number of locations, especially with human remains near the doorstone and near the southwest terminal slab. None of the human bones showed signs of burning. There was a continuous ash layer in the centre of the anteroom.

Grave offerings

Most finds appeared to be from the main chamber. They were probably placed there on the same occasions as the human bodies. The low number of finds may be the result of the early destruction of the tomb. More common finds included cattle bones and stone tools, including flint knives and sickle blades as well as locally typical triangular slate axes. There were at least three bone tools, namely a chisel, a point and an arrowhead. Pottery fragments were scant; they included a clay cup similar to examples from the related Lohra tomb

Lohra (megalithic tomb)

The Lohra tomb was a megalithic monument outside Lohra near Marburg in north central Hesse, Germany. It is one of the lesser known among its type in Central Europe. It dates to the late Neolithic, probably just after 3000 BC...

and collared bottles connected with the northern Funnel Beaker (TRB) Culture

Funnelbeaker culture

The Funnelbeaker culture, short TRB from Trichterbecherkultur is the principal north central European megalithic culture of late Neolithic Europe.- Predecessor and successor cultures :...

. Such bottles appear to have served some special function, maybe the storage of vegetable oils or sulphur for healing purposes. A so-called Giant Urn belongs to the later burial.

Rock carvings

One of the most striking features of the tomb is the presence of carved symbols on the slabs inside the chamber. Lines are formed of rows of individual punched dots, possibly applied with a very early metal tool. One of the more common symbols is a simple line with an attached open semicircle, usually interpreted as a stylised depiction of cattle. Normally, two of these symbols are linked by a further line with emphasised terminals. This may be a simple depiction of a plough. More rarely, two of them are linked by what resembles a yoke and pole, suggesting a cart. Occasionally overlapping signs suggest that the individual carvings are in no meaningful relationship to one another, but represent an accumulation of individual signs. Similar depiction of teams of cattle are known from much more recent (Bronze

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

or Iron Age

Iron Age

) carvings at Valcamonica near Capo di Ponte

Capo di Ponte

Capo di Ponte is an Italian comune of 2.483 abitanti in Val Camonica, province of Brescia, in Lombardy.-Geography:...

, Northern Italy

Northern Italy

Northern Italy is a wide cultural, historical and geographical definition, without any administrative usage, used to indicate the northern part of the Italian state, also referred as Settentrione or Alta Italia...

and at Mont Bégo

Mont Bégo

Mont Bégo is a mountain in the Mercantour massif of the Maritime Alps, in southern France, with an altitude of . It is included in the Vallée des Merveilles ....

in the French

France

part of the Ligurian Alps

Ligurian Alps

The Ligurian Alps are a mountain range in northwestern Italy. A small part is located in France. They form the south-western extremity of the Alps, separated from the Apennines by the Colle di Cadibona. The Col de Tende separates them from the Maritime Alps...

. The symbols are normally assumed to reflect Neolithic

Neolithic

ideological

Ideology

An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...

or religious

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

ideas.

Reconstruction

A reconstruction of the grave can be seen in the Hessian State Museum (Hessisches Landesmuseum) in Kassel

Kassel

Relationships with other sites

Like any archaeological monument, the Züschen tomb should not be seen as isolated. It is in a close relationship with its landscape and with other sites in the area. Two further tombs, Züschen II and Züschen III are known to have existed in the area. Züschen II was 150m northwest of the main tomb, it was generally comparable, but smaller and undecorated. A third tomb, Züschen III, is located further east. Less than 1 km from the Züschen tomb lies the Hasenberg, a prominent basalt

Basalt

dome, the top of which contains an important Wartberg settlement. Intriguingly, the Züschen tomb also appears to be designed in such a way that its main axis point directly at the Wartberg itself, 4 km to the east.

External links

Source of translation

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.