page_title: Funnelbeaker culture
section_title: Graves
hierarchical_section_title: Funnelbeaker culture / Characteristics / Graves
caption_attribution_description: Dansk: Skarpsallingkarret
context_page_description: The Funnelbeaker culture, in short TRB or TBK was an archaeological culture in north-central Europe.
  It developed as a technological merger of local neolithic and mesolithic techno-complexes between the lower Elbe and middle Vistula rivers, introducing farming and husbandry as a major source of food to the pottery-using hunter-gatherers north of this line.
  It was preceded by Lengyel-influenced Stroke-ornamented ware culture groups/Late Lengyel and Baden-Boleráz in the southeast, Rössen groups in the southwest and the Ertebølle-Ellerbek groups in the north.
  The TRB techno-complex is divided into a northern group including modern northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, a western group in the Netherlands between the Zuiderzee and lower Elbe that originated in the Swifterbant culture, an eastern group centered on the Vistula catchment, roughly ranging from Oder to Bug, and south-central groups around the middle and upper Elbe and Saale. Especially in the southern and eastern groups, local sequences of variants emerged.
context_section_description: The houses were centered on a monumental grave, a symbol of social cohesion.
  Burial practices were varied, depending on region and changed over time. Inhumation seems to have been the rule.
  The oldest graves consisted of wooden chambered cairns inside long barrows, but were later made in the form of passage graves and dolmens. Originally, the structures were probably covered with a mound of earth and the entrance was blocked by a stone.
  The Funnelbeaker culture marks the appearance of megalithic tombs at the coasts of the Baltic and of the North sea, an example of which are the Sieben Steinhäuser in northern Germany. The megalithic structures of Ireland, France and Portugal are somewhat older and have been connected to earlier archeological cultures of those areas. At graves, the people sacrificed ceramic vessels that contained food along with amber jewelry and flint-axes.
caption: Skarpsalling vessel, Denmark, 3200 BC
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