Near Magdeburg, an industrial area is being developed for the US chip manufacturer Intel. Archaeologists from the Saxony-Anhalt State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology (LDA) have been investigating the area since 2023. The work will be completed in April 2024, months before construction of the first two semiconductor plants begins. The investigations have once again yielded spectacular results.
The large 300-hectare industrial park also partially includes a small hill, known as Eulenberg. Although not particularly high, it divides the otherwise relatively low-lying landscape of Börde, whose fertile loess and black earth soils were an important factor for settlement already during the early Neolithic. The area examined today proved to be a very complex and long-used burial and ritual landscape.
During the Baalberg culture (4100-3600 B.C.), in the Middle Neolithic, two large trapezoidal wooden burial chambers, 20 and 30 meters long, were built only 200 m apart from each other. Undoubtedly, both were covered with a lot of earth; probably, the burial mounds dominated the landscape.
The corridor in between was probably a procession route about a thousand years later, during the period of the Globular Amphora Culture (3300-2800 BC). Pairs of young cattle 2-3 years old were sacrificed and buried along this route.
In one case, the tomb of a 35-40 year old man was excavated in front of the cattle burials, creating the image of a chariot with driver or a plow pulled by cattle, orchestrations that are already known from other more ancient and contemporary burials. They symbolize that cattle were offered to the gods as the most important possession, the security of their own sustenance.
About 1,000 years later, a palisade ditch that was still 50 cm wide retraced the course of the ancient procession route and deliberately included the larger of the two burial mounds in the large burial landscape of about 3 hectares.
It passed over the cattle burials, but did not destroy them. In addition, several burial mounds of the Corded Pottery culture (ca. 2800-2050 B.C.) with diameters of about 10 m were discovered about 600 m apart.
The consistency in the ritual use of this part of the Eulenberg is striking, and further analysis of the finds promises even more interesting revelations.
Sources
Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt
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