Long before there were Germanic peoples – some 4,300 years ago – people in today’s Saxony-Anhalt raised a vast ring of earth and wood: the ring sanctuary of Pömmelte, often called the „German Stonehenge". A place of the sun, of ritual – and of grim finds.
The ring sanctuary of Pömmelte lies on the Elbe south of Magdeburg. It consists of several concentric rings of ditches, banks and wooden posts, about 115 metres across, built around 2300 BC – contemporary with the later building phases of English Stonehenge.
Like its English model, the monument is astronomically aligned: its gates and axes refer to marked points in the sun’s course, such as the solstices. Pömmelte was an assembly and cult place of an Early Bronze Age community – a place where sky, time and community came together.
In the ditches and shaft-pits archaeologists found deliberate deposits: smashed pottery, animal bones, stone axes, grinding stones – and the remains of humans, mostly women and children, some with injuries. Whether these are sacrifices, burials or ritual deposits is still disputed. What is certain: here people did not only feast, but also enacted something grave.
Pömmelte belongs to the same Early Bronze Age world as the Nebra Sky Disc. Nearby lay a contemporary settlement and a second ring (Schönebeck) – together a whole ritual landscape. In 2016 the monument was reconstructed on the original site and is freely accessible today.
The Únětice Culture & Nebra · The Externsteine · Donar’s Oak.
State Office for Heritage and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt (Pömmelte, Schönebeck). Harald Meller (ed.), publications on the Early Bronze Age of Central Germany; Der geschmiedete Himmel (2004).