Gräberfeld von Derenburg

The Derenburg burial field lies in the Harz foothills near Blankenburg. It was used for about five centuries, from 5500 to 5000 BC, by the Linear Pottery culture. Forty graves were dug over roughly twenty generations, making it one of the oldest such sites in Saxony-Anhalt. The most unusual discovery is the Spondylus shell jewellery, which has not been found elsewhere north of the Harz. The finds show how carefully the people treated their belongings. A repaired arm-ring still bears the Birch-pitch glue that once held a shell plug in place. One woman’s grave contained a full set of Spondylus objects: arm-rings, beads and a belt clasp. A man’s grave held arm-rings and beads cut from the same shells. Even a horse’s tooth was drilled twice after the first hole broke. The shells came from the Mediterranean and Black Sea, carried hundreds of kilometres inland. Spondylus ornaments appear in only about one grave in ten, so they were prized possessions. Their lachs-coloured sheen earned them the name ‘Stone Age gold’. The burial field stands on open ground where visitors can walk between the marked graves and imagine the lives of the first farmers who laid their dead to rest there.