Archaeologists Excavate 4,200-Year-Old Neolithic “Zombie Grave”

Archaeologists discovered an ancient grave near Oppin in Saxony-Anhalt. The individual buried there was held down by a large stone to prevent them from “coming back to life” and causing trouble.

The exact age of the grave is not yet known, but clues hint it is about 4,200 years old. If this early estimate is correct, is the first time such a strange burial from that period in Central Germany has been discovered.

During excavations before expanding power lines, scientists found a grave of a man aged between 40 and 60 years old. No objects were buried with him. He was laid on his left side with his legs bent, and a big stone was placed on his lower legs.

The stone is over three feet long, one-and-a-half feet wide, four inches high, and weighs 110 pounds. This heavy stone was placed there to ensure the person wouldn’t come back to life.

🔵 A 4,200-year-old 'zombie grave' was found in Germany. pic.twitter.com/iopGdCBKtE

— SDR News (@sdrnews2023) April 22, 2024

“We know that even in the Stone Age people were afraid of unpleasant revenants. People wanted to prevent that with magic,” said project manager and archaeologist Susanne Friederich.

“There are graves where the corpse even lies on its stomach,” she revealed. “Back then, people believed that dead people sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves. If it lies on its stomach, it burrows deeper and deeper instead of rising to the surface.”

“There are also dead bodies lying on their stomachs” and those “were also pierced with a lance, so they were practically fixed in the ground,” explained Friederich.

Outline of a house near the two burials

Last November, Friederich and her team discovered another possible revenant burial in the Oppin region, but this one was more recent from the 2nd or 3rd century. Three large stones were placed on the person’s legs.

They found a bronze fibula in the grave, indicating the person was not poor. Nearby, they found the skeletal remains of a woman without any measures against revenants. Moreover, there’s an outline of a house near both burials, suggesting that these two individuals might have lived there, according to “The History Blog.”

The Neolithic skeletal remains have been removed from the grave and are being transported to a lab in Halle for more examination.

The burial is linked to the Bell Beaker culture, also called the Bell Beaker complex, a group of people from the Bronze Age who appeared around 2800 BC. They spread out across most of Western Europe and parts of northwestern Africa.

The digging along the power line’s expansion path is ongoing, and there’s a lot to dig through with over 90 miles just in Saxony-Anhalt (335 miles in total). The plan is to keep digging until 2025.