STONEHENGE’S CONTINENTAL COUSIN

In the middle of a potato field not far from the small village of Pömmelte in central Germany, University of Halle archaeologist Franziska Knoll unrolls a five-foot-long piece of paper and tapes it to the graffiti-streaked side of a shipping container full of recently excavated artifacts. A set of concentric circles fills one corner of the paper. Under that, dozens of rectangles, all oriented in the same direction, march along the length of the page. The blueprint is the fruit of three years of excavation that has involved everything from earthmoving equipment to tweezers. The dig’s scale is hard to fathom. In 2020 alone, a 15-person team from the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt excavated more than six acres, in trenches as long as several football fields laid end to end.

Knoll has to raise her voice to talk over the rumbling of a 28-ton Caterpillar 323 excavator carving a new trench nearby. The rectangles on the paper, she explains, represent the outlines of dozens of houses, traces of a settlement that thrived here at the dawn of the Bronze Age. The circles represent the remains of a large wooden sanctuary that was built at the same time as the neighboring village. “It’s the largest Early Bronze Age settlement we know of in Central Europe,” Knoll says. “We’ve found sixty-five houses so far. This must have been a really significant place.”

The excavator’s operator maneuvers the machine’s metal bucket to scrape away a foot or so of dirt at a time while one of Knoll’s team members in a hard hat and steel-toed boots keeps a close eye on the soil. He is looking