Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Domarkullen
DatedEst. 2000 BCE–1050 CE
Photo Teleduxen · CC BY-SA 4.0Source file on Wikimedia Commons
Overview
About this site
Overview
Domarkullen, also called Domarekullen, is a Bronze Age burial mound at Gräshagen in Jönköping, Sweden. It is 17 meters in diameter and two meters high, and it has not been investigated by archaeologists.
Read on Wikipedia1 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.
Article
Domarkullen
The position gave a panoramic view over the surroundings, including Munksjön and the river Tabergsån, which flows past just over 200 meters to the east.
DescriptionSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Swedish): Domarkullen, JönköpingCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Swedish): Domarkullen, JönköpingCC BY-SA 4.0
The mound lies surrounded by buildings on a plateau at the foot of a north-south ridge. The position gave a panoramic view over the surroundings, including Munksjön and the river Tabergsån, which flows past just over 200 meters to the east.
ContextSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Swedish): Domarkullen, JönköpingCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Swedish): Domarkullen, JönköpingCC BY-SA 4.0
Domarkullen is one of three surviving Bronze Age mounds in and around Jönköping. The other two are Lustigkulle at Liljeholmen and Dödskallehöjden at Råslätt.
Round mounds in Sweden belong in many cases to the Nordic Bronze Age, roughly 1700 to 500 BCE, when the elite were buried beneath mounds of earth or stone. Many of these graves have not been excavated, and their dates are inferred from shape, setting and the grave goods of excavated neighbours.
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
3 photographs, each with its author and licence
More photographs
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°45′40″ N, 14°07′56″ EFor a GPS or map app: 57.76107, 14.13220
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.
- Stone circleSandseryd 12:22000 BCE–800 CE
- Stone circleSandseryd 7:12000 BCE–800 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)2)Döskallehöjden4)Råslätt2000 BCE–1050 CE
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Sandseryd 8:32000 BCE–1050 CE
- Stone circleSandseryd 8:22000 BCE–800 CE
- Stone circleSandseryd 8:12000 BCE–800 CE
Sagaholm4000–1200 BCEPhoto: Anders Franzen (Jönköpings läns museum) · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Sandseryd 21:12000 BCE–1050 CE
Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
2 sources behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q29385413wikidata.org
- 02Source for this dateen.wikipedia.org
Image files
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Around this place
The ten nearest sites, by compass
Credit
Text, licence and sources
Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Domarkullen, Jönköping" (Swedish), 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