Lancken-Granitz dolmens

When the tombs were archaeologically assessed in 1969, Stone and Bronze Age funerary goods were retrieved, including flint hatches, stone axes, amber pearls, bronze needles and necklaces as well as an abundance of arrowheads and pottery.

[1] A group of seven dolmens is lined up northwest of the road between Lancken and Klein Stresow, numbered 1 to 7 from the northeast to the southwest.

[4] Initially their number had been much larger, but many were destroyed when their boulders were used for church, housing and street construction since the Middle Ages.

[4] In the 20th century, local teacher Friedrich-Wilhelm Furthmann and his wife preserved the dolmens in the Lancken-Granitz and Burtevitz area, before they were excavated by archaeologist Ewald Schuldt in 1969 and immediately thereafter restored for touristic use.

[2] This was part of a series of 106 excavations conducted by Schuldt's team on megalith sites in present-day Mecklenburg-Vorpommern between 1964 and 1972.

1 and 3),[6] the most common form of Neolithic tomb encirclement structures, or a stone circle (Bannkreis, dolmen Nr.

[1] All dolmens were constructed from glacial erratic boulders, with the gaps filled with plates of red sandstone and clay.

[11] Similar sandstone plates were used to subdivide the interior of some of the dolmens into a hallway with adjacent compartments.

[13] Common Neolithic funerary goods found in the dolmens of the region are tools, pottery, and amber pearls.

[14] It is assumed that the pots were filled with groceries, and that there were also other, long decomposed organic funerary goods.

[14] Funerary goods found in each dolmen near Lancken include flint hatches, chisels, amber pearls, and pottery,[15] the latter being in part of the Funnelbeaker (TRB) type.

1 was abandoned and filled with rocks and dirt, had its entrance closed and was covered by an artificial hill.

[2] The dolmens were nevertheless frequented by the local population throughout the Iron Age as well as the Slavic and the early German period, as multiple archaeological finds show,[19] yet they were also used as a dump by the local East German LPG for "stones which had been cleared from the fields".