Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Bjärs hög
DatedEst. 2000 BCE–1050 CE
Photo Bene Riobó · CC BY-SA 4.0Photo taken at this location (Wikimedia Commons)Source file on Wikimedia Commons
Overview
About this site
What the sources say
Bjärs hög (auch Bjärs backe genannt) ist eine von wenigen bronzezeitlichen Rösen (1800–500 v. Chr.) auf der schwedischen Ostseeinsel Gotland. In Rone gibt es eine und der Wald Elleskogen bei Garda beherbergt zwei weitere Hügel aus dieser Zeit.
Hinter dem Bauernhof von Bjärs in Norrlanda nahe der Straße 146 liegt der Steinhügel von etwa 55,0 m Durchmesser und 6,0 m Höhe. Damit gehört er zu den so genannten Storrösen, von denen sich 22 Exemplare auf Gotland finden. In der Nähe liegen einige kleinere Röser.
Article in GermanRead on Wikipedia2 min readCC BY-SA 4.0
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
Bjärs hög: the whole story
In briefSources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
Bjärs hög, also called Bjärs backe, is one of only a few surviving Bronze Age stone mounds on Gotland, Sweden’s Baltic Sea island. The mound stands behind the Bjärs farm in Norrlanda, near Road 146.
The stone mound measures about 55 metres across and rises to roughly 6 metres. It belongs to a group of 22 large stone mounds, or Storrösen, recorded on Gotland. Several smaller mounds lie nearby.
It is one of three dated mounds in the Rone area: Bjärs hög and two mounds in Elleskogen near Garda. Its Bronze Age date is estimated from its form and archaeological comparisons rather than from an excavation of the mound itself.
The wider dating range for the mound is 2000 BCE to 1050 CE. Burial mounds of this kind were often associated with burials during the Nordic Bronze Age, when cremation and the burial of ashes in urns became common.
No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the German article "Bjärs hög", shown in the original language.
Summary in EnglishSources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
Bjärs hög is a megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones) in Region Gotland, Sweden. A typological estimate: 2000 BCE to 1050 CE. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the German article "Bjärs hög", shown in the original language.
How this page was madeSources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
The summary at the top of this page was written by MiniMax-M3 (2026-11-08) from the cited Wikipedia article “Bjärs hög”, translated from German. The numbers in it were checked automatically against the source text. The rest of the page is the article itself, the structured records and computed distances.
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
From the article
Dated moments in the story
- 500 BCE
Bjärs hög (auch Bjärs backe genannt) ist eine von wenigen bronzezeitlichen Rösen (1800–500 v. Chr.) auf der schwedischen Ostseeinsel Gotland.
Source
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
- 57°31′04″ N, 18°42′16″ EFor a GPS or map app: 57.51788, 18.70433
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.
Norrlanda 20:12000 BCE–1050 CE- Norrlanda 25:12000 BCE–800 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Norrlanda 23:12000 BCE–1050 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Norrlanda 24:12000 BCE–1050 CE
- Stone circleNorrlanda 10:12000 BCE–800 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Norrlanda 8:12000 BCE–1050 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Norrlanda 81:12000 BCE–1050 CE
- Stone circleNorrlanda 30:12000 BCE–800 CE
Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
2 sources behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q29343533wikidata.org
- 02Source for this dateen.wikipedia.org
Image files
- Bjärs hög, Norrlanda 01.jpgBene RiobóCC BY-SA 4.0
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Around this place
The ten nearest sites, by compass
Credit
Text, licence and sources
Text from the Wikipedia article "Bjärs hög" (German), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; authors are listed in the page history. Reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikipedia · Edit history and authors
- Wikipedia (German): Bjärs högCC BY-SA 4.0
- Wikidata Q29343533CC0