Name: Großsteingrab Steinbeck
Address: DE

Overview

The Großsteingrab Steinbeck, also called the Hünenschloss, is a megalithic tomb of the Neolithic Funnel Beaker culture at Steinbeck, a district of Buchholz in der Nordheide in the district of Harburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. It is catalogued as Sprockhoff number 674.

The monument was largely destroyed in the early nineteenth-century road works described below, and only a modest remnant survives. Descriptions from before its destruction record an exceptionally large tomb.

A detailed description was published by C. Einfeld in 1855, based on a report by the Hofbraurat Wittmann of 1813. The tomb was largely destroyed at that time, when Napoleon I had the Bremer Straße (today's B 75) widened into a chaussee. According to the report, the tomb had a Hünenbett (long barrow with a stone kerb) oriented north-west to south-east, 70 m long and 5.4 m wide. Of the kerb, 34 stones were still present, fewer than a quarter of the original number.

The burial chamber lay 11 m from one end of the Hünenbett. It was 10.5 m long, 2.4 m wide and 1.75 m high, and was of the type known as an Emsland chamber. It had 15 wall stones and four capstones, of which three were still present in 1813. The chamber floor was paved with pebbles.

When Ernst Sprockhoff recorded the site in 1967, only three kerb stones of the south-western long side and the western corner stone of the north-western short side remained in situ. A further stone standing in situ is built into the corner of a house. Three other stones are no longer in their original position, and one of them is split.

Großsteingrab Steinbeck

Overview

The site's dated range, placed against world reference points.