Qualla: Altendorf Megalithic Tomb

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty skulls sat in a row along the left-hand wall. Elsewhere they were stacked into piles and pyramids; long bones lay in caches of their own, sorted by type; of eight skeletons still articulated, six had no head. None of this is decay. Somebody came back into this tomb, repeatedly, long after the flesh was gone, and rearranged the dead - lifting skulls from bodies, gathering them along a wall, tidying limbs into groups. They were Late Neolithic farmers in northern Hesse, and they kept it up for what may have been centuries. When the chamber at Altendorf was finally excavated in 1934, it contained the remains of at least 235 human beings, and possibly 250.

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: Seventeen Metres of Sandstone

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 metre...

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: The Soul Hole

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: A Village Over Generations

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 standar...

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: Fox Jaws and a Spiral of Copper

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cremate...

Altendorf Megalithic Tomb: Ploughed Up and Carried Away

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...