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Inhumation graves discovered at the La Tène and Roman period settlement of Nebovidy near Kolín

Publication at Central Library of Charles University, Faculty of Arts |
2020

Abstract

In 2009 and 2010, two rescue excavations took place on the eastern edge of the town of Kolín, however, already in the cadastral area of Nebovidy. In the area of settlements dating from the La Tène and Roman periods, two grave pits (features 5 and 9/11) with a total of three burials (K1, K2 and K3) were discovered.

It is not likely they were spatially linked, but there is something they have in common - the absence of datable finds. A burial of an adult man, K1, in feature 5 was oriented rather unusually with the head towards the east.

The position of the man's feet indicates that he was originally placed in a wooden case (coffin). Burials K2 and K3 were gradually deposited above each other in a single grave pit (features 9 and 11) in a way that an elderly woman (burial K3) was buried as first.

She had no archaeologically detectable grave goods and was covered with larger stones. Above her, there were buried the scattered remains of an adult man.

Both graves were oriented with the head towards the west. The grave pit was slightly eccentrically placed inside a square enclosure with dimensions of 6,86 x 6,7 m, whose ditch probably contained a palisade.

The only funerary offering was an iron finger ring still slipped on the finger segment of burial K2 and another, very similar iron ring found among the bones. Judging from the scattered bones, burial K2 was probably looted.

The interpretation and dating of both graves is only possible through comparison with rare and more or less distant analogies from the Czech Republic and neighbouring countries. Their dating to the late Roman or the early Migration period (stages C3-D1), i.e. to the 4th century to the first third of the 5th century, seems to be most likely.

A close analogy is especially the wellknown chamber tomb, no. 1, from Plotiště nad Labem near Hradec Králové, which, due to its looting, is also only roughly dated. The most reliable support would be radiocarbon dating, which has so far not been carried out.