15 Introduction The excavation history of burial places in the Hallstatt period (Early Iron Age) in Central Europe goes back at least five hundred years. However, substantial changes in our perception of these places has only happened in the last six decades. The following paper will concentrate particularly on older excavation techniques, but will also explore some exemplary modern excavations which have been especially influential in our understanding of these sites. I will highlight limitations associated with specific excavation techniques, and towards the end of the paper, I will explore advances in our understanding of Early Iron Age burial practices through the results of modern excavations. This paper is largely limited to southwest and southern Germany, which is identical to the federal states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Determinants of preservation Around 1900 cemeteries dating to the Hallstatt period comprising approximately 20,000 large and small burial mounds are known in Southern Germany (Figure 1), although it is thought this number of burials may represent as little as 10% of the original number (Müller-Scheeßel 2007). In some respects, the distribution of cemeteries gives a fair representation of the prehistoric settlement pattern in the region. This applies especially to the mountainous areas of the Alps, the Black forest and the Bavarian forest, where there are no cemeteries. However, the distribution map is also misleading in other places. For example, in the fertile areas of the Rhine and Neckar valleys, there was certainly a much denser net of cemeteries as is implied by ample evidence for settlements (e.g., Hees 2002: 153 for the lower Neckar region around Heilbronn), but they are not known or did not survive. Furthermore, not all Hallstatt cemeteries necessarily consisted of mounds; some contain only flat graves. In general, however, the map of all cemeteries and those with mounds are almost identical. The main factors resulting in the poor preservation or destruction of burial mounds reflects their re-use and re-opening in ancient times, and the impact of modern building and agricultural activities. During many periods of history and prehistory burial mounds were erected or used, beginning from the Neolithic until through to medieval times. Some mounds were even used for burial in the modern era. This often leads to difficult excavation situations (see below) and also often implied the destruction of earlier burials. This is one of the factors for loss of information. While quite a few burial chambers were re-opened in ancient times, it was a particularly common occurrence in the Early Bronze Age and Early Medieval period (see Kümmel 2009). Even when graves were re-opened, although burial goods may have been removed, the graves were never destroyed in their entirety. Far more severe was the damage caused through early modern excavations. These early ‘excavations’, especially of the 19th century, played havoc with the burial mounds. In many cases these excavations probably left very little archaeologically viable material for future archaeologists. 1 As well as early excavation, many monuments have been heavily damaged by agriculture, especially with the onset of industrial farming (deep ploughing). For mounds where we have records going back to the 19th century, many of them have been reduced in height by a metre or more over the course of 100 years. In the example of the cemetery near the ‘Burrenhof’ in Baden-Württemberg (Kurz 1997: 12f.), some of the mounds have been ploughed from 1838 onwards, others remained in meadow land. When they were measured in 1893, those in arable land were on average half a meter lower than those in meadow land (Figure 2). This meadow land was ploughed from roughly World War II onwards, and when mound number 5 – in 1893 still measuring 1.4 m in height – was recorded in the 1980s, it had a height of little more than half a meter (Kurz 1997: 13). It follows that the damage to these mounds through agricultural activity over the last 150 years has been very dramatic. Some mounds have vanished completely and are now unrecognisable. This applies to, for example, the ‘princely’ mound of Eberdingen-Hochdorf (see below), and also the burial mounds of Müllheim-Dattingen in Baden-Württemberg (Figure 3). Originally, there were almost certainly four mounds at this site, with a central 1 Cf. Klein 2015 for the negative re-evaluation of an excavation of Johannes Dorn in a mound of the Bronze Age near Wilsingen/Baden- Württemberg. Hallstatt Burial Mounds Then and Now: Excavations and Changing Images in the History of Research Nils Müller-Scheeßel