Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Beleshög
DatedEst. 2000 BCE–1050 CE
Photo Jorchr · CC BY-SA 3.0Source file on Wikimedia Commons
Overview
About this site
What the sources say
Beleshög is a megalithic mound in Malmö Municipality, Sweden. The catalogue places it at 55.5932° N, 12.9494° E and links it to Wikidata item Q29475115.
Built from structured records, not from an articleSources and licences
Where it sits in time
The site's dated range, placed against world reference points.
The scale is logarithmic: each step to the left is about ten times older than the last.
The full article
About Beleshög
This kind of monument hereSources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
Sweden's landscape is thick with prehistoric graves, and most of the mounds in the Atlas are round earth mounds (gravhögar) or heaps of stone (rösen, or cairns). Many belong to the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly 1700 to 500 BCE, when the elite were buried beneath mounds of earth or stone. In the early part of that period the dead were often laid in oak coffins or stone cists; towards the end of the second millennium BCE cremation became the norm, and the ashes went into an urn or a small pit under a cairn. The full article, “Swedish burial mounds and cairns”, follows below under About this kind of monument.
DatingSources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
The Atlas shows 2000 BCE to 1050 CE for this site, but that is a regional estimate for this kind of monument, not a date for this particular megalithic mound. No excavation, radiocarbon sample or other measurement is recorded for it, so the real age could fall anywhere within the range, or outside it.
The range rests on this regional background (source: the Wikipedia article “Nordic Bronze Age”): Swedish barrows are mostly Bronze Age rosen of the Nordic Bronze Age (c. 2000-500 BC); the Viking-age royal mounds of Gamla Uppsala belong to the Viking Age (about 800-1050 CE).
Landscape and neighbours
The catalogue lists 0 other sites within 1 km, 4 within 5 km and 60 within 10 km; 57 of them are also classed as megalithic mound. That puts it inside a dense cluster of monuments. In Malmö Municipality, Sweden, 54 of the 57 catalogued sites are classed as megalithic mound.
The nearest neighbours in the catalogue are Malmö 5:1 (1.6 km east, megalithic mound); Knutsbacken (2.5 km south-west, megalithic mound); Gruddhög (3.9 km south-east, megalithic mound); Hane hög (4.7 km south-east, megalithic mound). The catalogue is assembled from open records and is not complete, so unrecorded monuments may lie closer.
Records and protectionSources for this section
Sources for this section
Heritage records attach the status monument in Fornminnesregistret to this site. The open records for it are Wikidata (Q29475115), where corrections and further identifiers can be added. Many such sites stand on private land; check local access rules and respect the monument and its surroundings.
How this page was madeSources for this section
Sources for this section
This page was built automatically from Wikidata (CC0), the heritage register named above and the regional article “Swedish burial mounds and cairns”, written for the Atlas from the Wikipedia articles it cites (CC BY-SA 4.0), plus distances and counts computed from the catalogue coordinates. It contains no AI-written text.
Tradition and region
About this kind of monument
Swedish burial mounds and cairns
Sweden's landscape is thick with prehistoric graves, and most of the mounds in the Atlas are round earth mounds (gravhögar) or heaps of stone (rösen, or cairns). Many belong to the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly 1700 to 500 BCE, when the elite were buried beneath mounds of earth or stone. In the early part of that period the dead were often laid in oak coffins or stone cists; towards the end of the second millennium BCE cremation became the norm, and the ashes went into an urn or a small pit under a cairn.
Many of these graves have not been excavated. Their dates are inferred from shape, setting and the grave goods of excavated neighbours, so the Atlas gives a range instead of a single year.
The showpiece is the King's Grave at Kivik in Scania, the remains of an unusually grand double burial of about the fifteenth century BCE. Its restored cairn is some 75 metres across and 3.5 metres high. At the centre is a cist about 4 metres long, built of ten upright slabs, eight of them carved on the inside with ships, a two-horse chariot, lur players, axes, birds and fish. Farmers opened the chamber in 1748 while taking stone for field walls, and the carvings were first recognised in 1756. The excavation of 1931 recovered only teeth, bone fragments and broken bronze, because the grave had been looted. In the nineteenth century some scholars read the carvings as the work of Phoenician settlers; that idea was later rejected.
When visiting, look for mounds on ridges with a view over farmland or water, for kerb stones at the foot of a cairn, and for a shallow dip in the top that often marks an old digging.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Tumulus, Wikipedia: Nordic Bronze Age, Wikipedia: Kivik grave, Wikipedia: Burial mound · CC BY-SA 4.0
See it in 3D
An interpretive reconstruction of the monument, standing on the real ground at its exact point, under the sun for that place and season. Drag to look around it.
The reconstruction is ours, not a survey: it shows what a monument of this type looks like, at the size the record gives for this one.
Photographs
1 photograph, each with its author and licence
Lore
Evidence & Lore
What the sources actually support — and, kept apart, what has been claimed.
What the evidence supports
Dates
Est. 2000 BCE–1050 CEHow this date was established: Type comparisonTypical range for megalithic mounds in Sweden; this site has not been dated itself. Swedish barrows are mostly Bronze Age rosen of the Nordic Bronze Age (c. 2000-500 BC); the Viking-age royal mounds of Gamla Uppsala belong to the Viking Age (about 800-1050 CE).Source for this date
Where it stands
Sweden
The pin marks the monument itself — its exact point.
- Coordinates
- 55°35′36″ N, 12°56′58″ EFor a GPS or map app: 55.59322, 12.94943
Access is as our sources describe it; we have not visited the site to check.
Nearby
The closest sites in the Atlas, by straight line.
Malmö 5:12000 BCE–1050 CE
Knutsbacken2000 BCE–1050 CE
Gruddhög2000 BCE–1050 CE
Hane hög2000 BCE–1050 CE- MegalithStenhög2000–500 BCE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Bunkeflo 54:12000 BCE–1050 CE
Trindhög2000 BCE–1050 CE- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Lustbacken2000 BCE–1050 CE
Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
2 sources behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q29475115wikidata.org
- 02Source for this dateen.wikipedia.org
Image files
Report a correctionWrong date, name, photograph or source? Tell us and it will be put right.
Around this place
The ten nearest sites, by compass
Credit
Text, licence and sources
This page is assembled from open records (Wikidata, CC0; OpenStreetMap, ODbL) and a tradition article paraphrasing Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). No article exists for this site, and nothing here is written by a model.
- Wikidata Q29475115CC0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0
- en.wikipedia.orgCC BY-SA 4.0