The tomb was a gallery grave of the Wartberg culture - specifically the Hessian-Westphalian stone cist group - dating from around 3400 BC or a little after, probably one of the earliest such monuments in the region. It was not built above ground. A rectangular pit seventeen metres long and three wide was cut into the hillside, with a ramp down into its eastern end, and sandstone slabs were stood on edge in shallow trenches round the rim to make the walls.

Roughly thirty-three slabs were needed: fifteen a side, one closing the west end, two at the entrance. Nine survived, and ploughing had snapped the tops off all of them, leaving nothing above ninety centimetres though the slabs ran up to 1.8 metres long. The finished chamber was a corridor seventeen metres long, roofed by something that has not survived. A single slab inside might be the remnant of a stone roof; a dense packing of limestone, basalt and quartzite rubble above the burials, mixed with charcoal, might equally be a wooden roof fallen in under a mound.

At the eastern end the side walls ran on about 1.2 metres past the chamber, forming a small antechamber with the ramp leading down to it. On its earthen floor lay a single cow's shoulder blade, put there by someone and left.

Two slabs stood between antechamber and chamber, and into their facing edges the builders cut matching semicircles that together made an oval opening thirty-five centimetres across. German archaeology calls these Seelenlöcher - soul holes - and the same feature turns up in the Wartberg tombs at Züschen, Lohra and Bad Vilbel. Whether it was ever the working entrance is doubtful. Thirty-five centimetres is not a doorway, and by the later phases the deposits inside had built almost to the top of the walls. How the dead actually went in is not known.

There were up to four layers of burials, separated by soil, stones, charcoal and rotted wood: intermediate floors, or coverings laid between phases. Each new use disturbed the last, breaking, shifting and truncating what was there.

The anthropology, done early and by the standards of its day, gives the community a shape. Of those whose age could be read, 23 died before seven, 20 between seven and fourteen, 10 in their late teens or early twenties, 169 between twenty-two and fifty, and 13 past fifty. Sex could be determined for 115 skeletons, 75 male and 40 female. The men averaged 1.6 metres tall and their teeth were bad. Some bones show injuries that had healed - broken, mended, and the person went on living. Whether this is an entire settlement or part of one is not resolvable. Either way it is several generations of the same people, laid down in the same room.

Some of the dead were buried with things, and the choices feel specific enough to be personal. An elderly man lay with five fox jawbones, an arrowhead, a fossilised seashell and several pierced dog teeth. A woman over forty had a fox jaw, twenty pierced dog teeth, and the cremated bones of children - burnt human remains being almost unknown in Wartberg tombs. Behind one partition of upright slabs lay the skulls of five children. A spiral roll of copper, among the rarest materials available to these people, was found with a child's skull.

The jawbones are the standing puzzle. Sixty-six mammal mandibles came out of the tomb, forty-seven of them fox, the rest dog, wild cat, polecat, hedgehog and piglet. Most still had their canines, so they were not the source of the 119 pierced teeth beside them. They were collected for their own sake, for a reason nobody has recovered; other Wartberg tombs hold them too. Three amber beads had come from the Baltic; some of the flint was imported; two entire dogs appear to have been buried here deliberately.

The site was found by accident, almost certainly by a plough, early in the twentieth century. For years afterwards people dug into it casually and without records, and four metres of the monument was destroyed before systematic work began. W. Jordan directed the proper excavation in 1934 and found the contents, in spite of everything, remarkably well preserved.

Then the tomb was lifted out entirely. There is nothing at Altendorf to visit. The two-part entrance stone, the animal jawbones and copies of other finds sit at the Regionalmuseum Wolfhager Land in Wolfhagen; the rest is in Kassel's state museum. What is left on site is a field on a slope near Naumburg, and under it the empty pit where two hundred and fifty people were kept, sorted and visited for longer than most nations have existed.