The “Stone Age Park Dithmarschen” in Albersdorf (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany) is being reconstructed as a Neolithic cultural landscape from ca. 3.000 BC. Lying close to megalithic tombs and grave mounds dating from the first farmers in Northern Germany, the site offers educational activities like flint knapping, archery and leatherwork.
Since 1997 the Archaeological-Ecological Centre Albersdorf (AÖZA) in the country of Dithmarschen in the western part of Schleswig-Holstein is working on the aim to re-establish a cultural landscape from the Neolithic for about 5.000 years ago on an area of about 80 acres.
The AÖZA-project was right from the beginning a initiative from the community of Albersdorf and from the county of Dithmarschen; it was financed in the beginning by funding from the state of Schleswig-Holstein and coordinated by a planning office for the development of rural areas.
To realize the idea they have taken the following concrete steps:
- By a mostly natural, but on the base of a landscape-plan controlled development the AÖZA wants to establish in a long-term perspective a type of landscape which reminds in its structure, proportion and in other aspects of a Neolithic environment. The principle theme for the landscape-development is a half-open pasture woodland, which is formed by the domestic animals of the first farmers. The first domestic animals - sheep and cattle of old species - have already begun with their "work" for the landscape-development.
- In a second step the AÖZA is - since the summer of 1999 - building up a “Neolithic village” as an open-air museum on the project area in the immediate neighbourhood of original prehistoric grave monuments.
- As third step there will be built a new museum and service building with the name "Stone Age House", which will be opened for the season 2023. Here will be the focus on the Stone Age in the whole of Northern Germany, from the findings of the Neanderthal times until the early Bronze Age.
