The site lies one kilometre northwest of Bad Dürkheim, 170 metres above the town, and covers the 300-metre-high, domed summit of the hill and its southeastern hillside of the Kästenberg.

Other finds included iron, long knives (Hiebmesser) as well as querns (Napoleonshüte), pyramidal stones that were stuck point-down in the ground in order to provide the base for the milling of corn.

When, at the beginning of the La Tène period, the Greeks moved their trade routes to the Iberian Peninsula and the islands of the western Mediterranean, the settlers lost the source of their supply.

This is ascertainable from the under 20 cm thick settlement layer over the natural earth and from extremely rare improvements in the surviving base of the wall.

After those parts of Electoral Palatinate that were west of the Rhine had been awarded to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1815, Bavarian state surveyors became interested in the Heidenmauer.

Schleif thought he had uncovered a Germanic religious site, perhaps because he had mistaken a Roman marking in the Kriemhildenstuhl quarry below the Heidenmauer as a swastika.

The project aims to validate the results, which are published inter alia in the daily paper, Die Rheinpfalz,[2] of links to other Celtic relicts in the local area.

If the excavations are validated, they should corroborate the view that the impulse for the settlement inside the Heidenmauer came from the Limburg Plateau, which had already been occupied by the Celts who remained there until the land was taken by the Romans (1st century B. C.).

[1] The wall itself, a so-called Murus Gallicus, comprised a wooden frame constructed of vertical posts and horizontal crossbeams which was filled with dry rubble stone.

The ditch bends towards the northeast at the northernmost point of the wall, almost forming a right angle, and runs downhill before it ends after a distance of over 100 metres.

[1] In local folklore there is another legendary story of its origin: Hans von Trotha (around 1450–1503), a castellan regionally known as the robber baron, Hans Trapp, of the South Palatine castle of Bertwartstein (who almost certainly never visited the Heidenmauer site which had already fallen into ruins 2000 years ago), was supposed to have hidden a large supply of sausage in the ditch; this legend gave rise to its popular name, the Wurstgraben ("sausage ditch").