Bronze Age Burial Site of Sammallahdenmäki

This site looks just a bunch of rocks in the middle of the woods but is an important burial place of the Bronze Age

Sammallahdenmäki

This postcard was sent by Anja

Situated on the Gulf of Bothnia, the Bronze Age Burial Site of Sammallahdenmäki forms the largest, most varied and complete burial site from the Scandinavian Bronze Age, 1500-500 B.C. The site includes 33 burial cairns within an area of 36 ha. The cairns are disposed in several distinct clusters along the crests and upper slopes of a long ridge. Out of eight excavated cairns, six can be dated to the Bronze Age and two to the Early Iron Age.

Stone burial cairns were typical for western Bronze Age culture. These cairns were usually constructed of granite boulders quarried from the cliff face below the crest of the ridge or collected from the site itself. The cairns can be classified into several different groups according to their shapes and sizes. Sammallahdenmäki also contains two unusual structures: one oval and elongated structure, which seems to have been enlarged in successive stages, and a large quadrangular cairn, known as the “Church Floor”, which is unique in Finland and extremely rare in Scandinavia. - in: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/579/