Grabhügel

Burial mounds are found across Germany, from the northern plain to the south. Those of the Middle Bronze Age give a whole culture its name: the Tumulus culture (Hügelgräberkultur), which was dominant in Central Europe from about 1600 to 1300 BCE and buried its dead beneath mounds. It descended from the Unetice culture and covered parts of southern Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Poland and France. Its society was a warrior society, as the weapons in the graves show. The Late Bronze Age Urnfield culture, which followed it, preferred cremation, and the Hallstatt culture of the Early Iron Age revived the great mound for chieftains. Further down this page, About this kind of monument gives the whole of “German Hügelgräber and megalithic mounds”.

Typological estimate, not a date for this site: monuments of this kind in this region are normally dated 3500 BCE to 500 BCE. The range comes from what is known about megalithic mound monuments in Germany; nothing measured on this site itself is on record, so it may be younger or older than the range suggests.

The range rests on this regional background (source: the Wikipedia article “Megalith”): German barrows ( Hugelgraber) run from the Neolithic (construction in central and south-west Germany c. 3500 BC and northern and central Germany c. 3400 BC) to the Late Bronze and Iron Age.