Züschen (megalithic tomb)

The Züschen tomb (German: Steinkammergrab von Züschen, sometimes also Lohne-Züschen) is a prehistoric burial monument, located between Lohne and Züschen, near Fritzlar, Hesse, Germany. Classified as a gallery grave or a Hessian-Westphalian stone cist (hessisch-westfälische Steinkiste), it is one of the most important megalithic monuments in Central Europe. Dating to the late 4th millennium BC (and possibly remaining in use until the early 3rd), it belongs to the Late Neolithic Wartberg culture. The presence of incised carvings, comparable to prehistoric rock art elsewhere in Europe, is a striking feature of Wartberg culture tombs, known so far only from Züschen and from tomb I at Warburg.

The tomb was accidentally discovered in 1894. For a number of years, a row of sandstone blocks had impeded the local miller from ploughing one of his fields. When he decided to remove them, Rudolf Gelpke, an inspector from nearby Garvensburg castle, noted the unusual presence of sandstone in the area of a basalt outcrop. On a visit to the site, he recognised it as a prehistoric monument consisting of two parallel rows of regularly shaped vertical slabs. Gelpke erroneously associated the monument with the Chatti, a local Iron Age tribe. He convinced the owner of the field to remove soil only from the ends of the row. This revealed bones and pottery sherds. At this point, Wilhelm von Garvens, owner of the Garvensburg, was notified. He, in turn, informed the antiquarian Baron Felix von und zu Gilsa. After Gilsa's scrutiny, the tomb was excavated, still in 1894, by Johannes Boehlau, former director of the State Museum at Kassel. Further excavations took place in 1939 and 1949, under the direction of O. Uenze of the archaeological service of Marburg.

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