Tomb Interior
The final 2.7 m of the chamber, near the north end, is set off as a separate compartment by two vertically set slabs, leaving a 60 cm gap in the middle. The chamber formed by these slabs had two unconnected areas of cobbled floor, one of larger slabs in the west, and one of rubble in the east. Two postholes set in front of the back wall might indicate internal supports for a ceiling.
The state of the skeletons recovered, all of them inarticulate or only partially articulate, placed in a sequence of distinct layers, indicates that the dead were either allowed to decay partially outside the tomb (excarnation), or that their remains were reorganised after partial or complete decomposition within the tomb. It is doubtful whether the bodies entered the tomb through its entrance, as the uppermost levels of burials are only 30 cm under the top of the orthostaths. Interestingly, the same doubt has been raised on different grounds, namely the narrow Seelenloch entrances, at Züschen, Lohra and Altendorf.
Read more about this topic: Niedertiefenbach (megalithic Tomb)
Famous quotes containing the word interior:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)