Steinkiste Flögeln

The Steinkiste von Flögeln is a late Neolithic stone cist near the village of Flögeln in the Elbe-Weser region of Lower Saxony. It once lay beneath a burial mound thirty metres wide and more than two metres high, at the heart of a large cemetery used from the Neolithic into the Iron Age. Today the site forms part of an archaeological park reached by a marked trail, close to the Prehistoric Path Flögeln. The cist sits off-centre inside a ring of stones five metres across, its five upright slabs and single capstone still in place. Excavators found the interior undisturbed, filled mainly with sand except for an empty space at the top. Inside lay the unaccompanied skeleton of an adult, curled on the left side with the head to the south-east. Fragments of late Neolithic pottery and a decorated giant beaker rim were recovered around the mound. Parallels for such small cists, sometimes barely a metre long, appear in Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland where they are called ‘dwarf cists’. The Flögeln example shows the distinctive split-stone building style of the Single Grave culture. Its position at the centre of a burial ground used for millennia makes it an important link between Neolithic traditions and later periods.