Kirchberg - Tumuli

Kirchberg is the oldest town in the Hunsrück area and is situated on an important pre-historic track, which crossed the Hunsrück in a west-east direction just as the B50 does today. 
Another route, from the river Nahe to the Mosel valley, passed Kirchberg on the Hunsrück. 
Today a well signposted hiking route – the Celtic Trail – follows this old transport connection.
Scarcely any landscape in South and West Germany is as rich in tumuli as the woodlands of Hunsrück and Hochwald; they rank here among the best-known monuments of the pre-historic past.
The huge number of tumuli in the area of Kirchberg indicate what an important centre it must have been in pre-Roman times.
The barrows are mostly preserved in a flattened state but every now and then mighty single barrows occur that, in later times, were often used as landmarks or territorial borders.
To the north of Kirchberg, under cover of woodland whole tumuli groups have been preserved. Approximately 30m to the east of the district’s waste depot is a field in which there are 12 tumuli.
Further small tumuli groups, with 2 to 4 barrows, are spread around the forest.
A second tumuli group lies approximately 1,5 kilometre away on the crest of a low hill.
Although, as yet, no scientific investigations have been made it is assumed that the tumuli groups indicate the existence of scattered Iron Age settlements dating from the 6th to 4th century B.C.
The largest tumuli field of the middle Hunsruck is found in the Bannholz state forest, Hecken.  100 barrows are still visible.
The grave field was located on a hilltop, and thus easily visible.  The tumuli are separated into three groups, two of them along the hilltop and a third located approximately 300m to the west on the edge of the knoll.
Though the tumuli field has not yet been surveyed the size of the field would indicate that it originates  from some  time between the 6th and 4th century B.C.
In the 6th century inhumations had become commonplace.  The dead rested on a wooden bier or in a wooden coffin made of planks. The burial objects were very modest and uniform: Men had their lance with an iron tip and women were given different sorts of jewellery. The burial objects also included sets of pots and jars.
The tumuli fields attest to not very extended farm and hamlet settlements that were used over several generations. To date, the location of the settlements – small rectangular timber frame houses with mud-plastered walls and small storage buildings alongside – remains unknown.
About 17 tumuli are situated on the Western edge of the Hecken hilltop. Some of them are a remarkable size; the biggest measures 30m. Some of the tumuli were encircled by ditches.
The practice of placing a graveyard on a site bordered by a ditch and a bank was particularly developed during the last century B.C.
The tradition was continued in Roman times. It is presumed that the inhabitants of Roman estates sited their graveyards close to the Iron Age tumuli.
Today, the tumuli are covered in dense woodland but 2500 years ago, standing in open space upon mounds or low hills the traveller would have seen, clearly visible in the distance and rising above the hedgerows, the tumuli which stretched along the old transport route from the river Nahe towards Kirchberg,  the bond between the living and the  dead.

[Martin Thoma]