Dolmen of Wittenborn
| Dolmen of Wittenborn | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
|||
|
|||
| Coordinates | 53 ° 55 '19.2 " N , 10 ° 13' 19.2" E | ||
| place | Wittenborn , Schleswig-Holstein , Germany | ||
| Emergence | 3500 and 2800 BC Chr. | ||
| Sprockhoff no. | 243 | ||
The Wittenborn dolmen is a Neolithic rectangular dolmen with the Sprockhoff no. 243. It originated between 3500 and 2800 BC. BC as a megalithic system of the funnel beaker culture (TBK). The municipality of Wittenborn is located on the edge of the Segeberger Forest in the Segeberg district in Schleswig-Holstein .
The hill
The dolmen , with a probably half-height entry stone, was examined by E. Aner in 1950. It was located under a dune which overlaid the 0.6 m high round hill with a diameter of about 10 m. The mound consisted of light gray and brown sand. According to E. Aner, the narrow, dark gray band on the surface probably comes from a layer of turf.
The chamber
The northwest-southeast oriented chamber stood in a 0.4–0.5 m deep pit, so it was deepened (which indicates an early system). The trapezoid chamber has internal dimensions of 2.2 × 1.0-1.3 m. The 0.98 m high chamber is narrower in the southeast, where the entrance was presumably . The dolmen originally had three bearing stones on each long side and an end stone on the narrow side in the northwest. The cap stones are missing. Only two bearing stones on the east side were preserved - one damaged - and the end stone. The footprints of the other bearing stones and a less deepened footprint, probably from the half-height entry stone, were clearly visible in the pale sand. The hard shoulder on the southwest side angled slightly, making the chamber at the entrance narrower. In a gap between the south-western long side and the end stone, the remains of an intermediate masonry bedded in clay about one meter wide were preserved. Remnants of clay were also observed between the southeastern bearing stones and their footprints.
The bottom of the grave was covered by a 10–12 cm thick bed of burned flint . At the bottom of the northeast was a 3–4 cm thick layer of finely chipped flint heavily interspersed with charcoal. Coarser, charcoal-blackened flint was spread over the entire surface. The pavement stretched from the end stone to the shoulder of the half-height entry stone in the southeast. On the long sides (as has been observed many times) a 10–20 cm wide strip in front of the supporting stones remained free.
The stone wreath
The dolmen lay eccentrically in a wide, oval ring (six by five meters) made of head-sized stones, parts of which were exposed south of the entrance and in a search cut in the southwest of the facility. In the search cut, the 1.4 m wide stone wreath formed the edge of the sunk excavation. It ended at the level of the old terrain surface and went 0.4–0.5 m in depth. The stone wreath reached close to the chamber in the southeast and appears to be suspended in the access area. In the area near the access, the packing was significantly higher and reached almost to the upper edge of the bearing stone. The stone wreath is not an edging of the hill in the usual sense. The stone packing lay below the mound and could only be seen from the outside, if at all in the access area. It could have had a cultic significance as a spell because, according to E. Aner, it had no practical function.
A similar finding was observed at the Pöppendorfer Großsteingrab ( Lübeck ). At the base of the burial mound lay the remains of a presumably oval rolling stone wall, made of two to four layers of stones the size of a fist or overhead, which in places were sunk up to 0.3 m into the old surface.
Finds
The sunk construction pit, in the edge area of which the stone packing lay, was filled with sand. The chamber filling was recently disturbed. The bottom of the grave was disturbed in the northwest. In the north, around 40 teeth were found in and on the upper flint layer, and fragments of a skullcap, a lower jaw and several long bones on the flint fill. The skeletal parts were scattered with no apparent arrangement. According to the anthropological study by U. Schäfer, it is the remains of three, probably even four individuals of both sexes. A small shard and a fragment of a flint ax come from the chamber.
In the search section south-west of the dolmen, a few vessel fragments were found 0.4 m from the foot of the hill, about 0.2 m below the old surface between small stones.
See also
literature
- E. Aner: The stone chambers of Hörst, Albersdorf and Wittenborn . Offa, 9, pp. 2-10, 1951
- Ernst Sprockhoff : Atlas of the megalithic tombs of Germany. Part 1: Schleswig-Holstein. Rudolf Habelt Verlag, Bonn 1966, p. 63.
Individual evidence
- ↑ For Schleswig-Holstein J. Hoika presents figures, according to which about 12% of the small original and rectangular dolms but less than 2% of the passage graves and polygonal dolms are deepened. The other federal states are likely to produce similar figures
