Erdwerk von Wellie

The Erdwerk of Wellie is a Neolithic enclosure near the village of Wellie in Lower Saxony. It sits on a gentle rise about 1 500 metres west of an old Weser meander. The site covers roughly 5.7 hectares and is defined by a once-deep ditch that once encircled an area measuring about 250 by 300 metres. Seven gaps in the ditch served as entrances, bridged by low earthworks. The enclosure was spotted in the summer of 2018 by the aerial archaeologist Heinz-Dieter Freese during a low-level flight at 300 metres. A hot, dry season made the filled ditch show as a darker band in ripening wheat. Earlier geomagnetic surveys by the University of Göttingen in 2017 had already hinted at buried structures linked to nearby early-Saxon burial grounds. Systematic field-walking after the discovery produced nearly 900 artefacts, mainly flint tools and pottery sherds, whose positions were recorded by GPS. Since 2019 a team led by archaeologist Tobias Scholz has used a fluxgate magnetometer to map soil anomalies across 15 hectares. Soil cores taken with a Pürckhauer auger revealed the depth and filling history of the ditch. Researchers believe the site served as a central gathering place for communities of the Michelsberg culture in the 4th millennium BC. The nearest comparable enclosure lies eight kilometres away at Müsleringen, making Wellie one of the north-westernmost such sites in the North German Plain.