Cone tomb

The conical grave was a form of grave from the Bronze Age that was one of the barrows .

description

The cone graves are hemispherical, seldom flat conical, turf-covered mounds of earth ( tumuli ) piled up above the ground, lying individually or in groups. A large number of these burial mounds have been preserved in the western Baltic Sea region, where they were systematically excavated and examined from the first quarter of the 19th century. They found grave goods made of bronze , golden ornaments and stone urns .

Research history

As a result of his excavations in the Altmark around 1820, Johann Friedrich Danneil clearly delimited the conical graves from the stone " barrows " and later grave forms and their iron additions . As a result, he came to a periodization of the prehistory , which, according to the simultaneous investigations of the Dane Christian Jürgensen Thomsen on the basis of finds, was called the three-period system ( Stone Age - Bronze Age - Iron Age ). The Mecklenburg antiquity researcher Georg Christian Friedrich Lisch , who also reported on the Neuzapel cone graves in 1874, named the entire Bronze Age period “the time of the cone graves”, in contrast to the previous “time of the megalithic tombs” and the subsequent “time of the Wendengraves” with grave goods Iron. Lisch is therefore, like Danneil, one of the co-founders of a three-period system. Today these periods are subdivided in many ways and differentiated into regional cultures.

The term cone grave has been used less and less by archaeologists since the beginning of the 20th century, as a pure cone shape can hardly be found on the burial mounds. They are mostly rounded peaks with a height between 1.5 and 0.9 meters. During the excavations, however, it often turns out that the original diameter, recognizable by the border stones, is small in relation to the assumed original height, i.e. a relatively steep slope can be assumed. It turned out, however, that the cultures that dug these graves were not as uniform as had been assumed by early researchers when the grave shape was generally assigned to the Teutons . The cultural developments over the long period of the Bronze Age and regional differences could not be determined with the rough investigation methods of the 19th century, which were primarily aimed at spectacular finds. Therefore, the term cone grave is no longer regarded as a generic grave , but is mostly used as a synonym for tumulus. Traditionally, the name is still used for barrows, for example in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg .

Examples

Well-known cone graves in Mecklenburg:

• Four cone graves were excavated in the field of Peckatel in the Ludwigslust-Parchim district . In 1843, after the discovery of a gold bracelet in the group's second-largest hill, the cult chariot of Peckatel was discovered.
• The Trüllingsberg near Gagzow is a facility that was also known as the "cone grave of Gagzow".

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christian Jürgensen Thomsen: Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed. (Guide to Nordic Antiquity) . Det kongelige nordiske oldskriftselskab , Copenhagen 1836
2. ^ Georg Christian Friedrich Lisch: The grave urns of the cone graves. Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology, Yearbook for Archeology, Volume 10, pp. 353–366, year 1845 (1846)
3. ^ Robert Beltz: The graves of the older Bronze Age in Mecklenburg. First part. Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Archeology. Volume 67, pp. 83-196, 1902
4. ↑ Georg Christian Friedrich Lisch : Kegelgrab von Peccatel In: Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Antiquity, Yearbook for Antiquity, Volume 9, pp. 369–378, Year 1844 Online ( Memento of the original from 23 August 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info : The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF, German)