Stone box of birds

Stone box of birds Flapping 2
Coordinates	53 ° 38 '48.4 " N , 8 ° 47' 23.5" E Coordinates: 53 ° 38 '48.4 " N , 8 ° 47' 23.5" E
place	Flögeln, Lower Saxony , Germany
Sprockhoff no.	610

The stone box from Flögeln is a late Neolithic stone box near Flögeln , city of Geestland , district of Cuxhaven in the Elbe-Weser triangle in Lower Saxony .

The stone box was covered by a burial mound . The finding is one of several in the district of Cuxhaven, including in Sievern and Loxstedt . The hill with a diameter of about 28 m and a height of 2.3 m formed the center of a large burial field that has been archaeologically examined since 1956. Today it is part of an archaeological park, which is made accessible by a nature trail. The Flögeln Prehistory Path is also nearby .

The stone box lies eccentrically in a round stone setting with a diameter of 8.5 m, under the former hill. The stone setting still has a concentric inner ring made of stones the size of a head. It was covered by a pebble pack that stretched over the outer stone wreath, which apparently only served to stabilize the hill. The box consists of five plate-like side stones and the monolithic cap stone. It is 1.45 m long, 0.94 m wide and 0.52 m high. The floor was mainly a 1.10 x 0.6 m stone slab. The carefully sealed interior turned out to be undisturbed during the excavation. Except for a cavity in the upper third, the box was filled with sand.

Inside, the uncomfortable corpse shadow of an approximately 1.80 m long adult crouched down was revealed . He was lying on his left side, head on the southeast end, face turned southwest. Shards of the late Neolithic age were found in the hill, outside the stone box there were shards of a giant mug decorated with fingernails . They correspond to those ceramics that were found in the passage grave in the " Flögelner Holz " Sprockhoff no. 610 were recovered as the youngest find.

Information on site

Parallels to the late Neolithic stone box from Flögeln can be found in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland , where they are called "dwarf boxes" because of their small size. They are sometimes only 1 m long and 0.5 m wide, so that the dead barely fit into them. The use of split stones as building material is one of the characteristics of the stone boxes of the individual grave culture . The end-Neolithic stone boxes can be clearly distinguished from those of the older Bronze Age , such as in Meckelstedt or the Heerstedt . The stone box from Flögeln is likely to have been the center of a necropolis that gradually emerged from the Neolithic to the pre-Roman Iron Age .