Overview
The Heuneburg occupies a commanding spur above the upper Danube near Herbertingen in Baden-Württemberg, in the early Celtic heartland of southwestern Germany. Occupied at intervals from the Bronze Age, it reached its height in the early Iron Age, during the late Hallstatt and early La Tène periods, roughly between 620 and 450 BCE, when it became one of the most important power centres of early Celtic Europe.
Its most extraordinary feature dates to around 600 BCE. In place of the usual timber-and-earth ramparts of the period, the rulers of the Heuneburg built a fortification wall of sun-dried mudbrick set on a stone foundation, with projecting bastions, in a technique borrowed directly from the Mediterranean world. Nothing else like it is known anywhere north of the Alps. The white plastered wall would have been visible for miles and was a deliberate display of contact with, and emulation of, the civilizations of Greece and the Etruscans.
Excavation has shown that the fortified citadel was only the core of a much larger settlement. Beyond the walls lay an extensive lower town of planned streets and houses, together covering perhaps 100 hectares and home to an estimated several thousand people. This scale has led archaeologists to describe the Heuneburg as the earliest city, or proto-city, north of the Alps. Some scholars identify it with Pyrene, a place the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, located near the source of the Danube — which would make it the earliest named settlement in central Europe recorded in history.
The power and wealth of its elite are vividly shown in the surrounding burial mounds. The Hohmichele was one of the largest burial mounds in Europe, and in 2010 the nearby Bettelbühl necropolis yielded the richly furnished grave of an early Celtic woman, the "Bettelbühl princess," buried around 583 BCE with gold and amber ornaments, datable with rare precision thanks to preserved timber. Imported Greek black-figure pottery, Mediterranean wine amphorae, and other luxury goods found at the site document long-distance trade networks reaching the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseille) and beyond. Today an open-air museum reconstructs part of the mudbrick wall and gateway on the original site.
