Abstrakt
Major changes in social norms and perhaps cosmology of farming communities occurred in Central Europe during the Third Millennium BC. Amongst the changes was sudden discontinuity in the long tradition of ditch and hill top enclosures.
This phenomenon has its pedigree in the Neolithic round ditch shrines, so called rondels. Despite of many formal changes it is possible to trace the continuing tradition of ditch monuments also during the Proto-Eneolithic period (4500-3800 cal.
BC) in the form of so called causewayed enclosures and in the early Eneolithic (3800-3350 cal. BC) as oval and square ditch enclosures of the TRB Culture (Turek 2012).
Since this period also occurred another form of ditch enclosures located on hill tops. I suppose that the hill top enclosures used to be erroneously interpreted as hill-forts, fortified sites.
Such interpretation may be more related to much later phenomenon of Iron Age and early Medieval forts and oppidae. The Eneolithic hill top enclosures rather continue the tradition of flat landscape ditch enclosures (Turek 1997).
Together with emergence of Corded Ware phenomenon at the beginning of Late Eneolithic, roughly between 2900 and 2800 cal. BC the habit of using hill tops disappeared in most regions of Central Europe.
Within the archaeological record of Beaker Cultures the funerary sites are absolutely prevalent. The symbolical structure of burial rites was very fundamentally emphasized and the cult ceremonies probably moved into natural shrines existence of which is recently detected in different sites of Central Europe.
By sacrifices, in the sacred mountains people in the Corded Ware period and later have worshiped the souls of their deceased ancestors and heroes living inside the mountains. Such ritual behaviour may be the basis of Indo-European legends about kings and knights sleeping in the sacred mountains.