Hagadösen

Hagadösen
Photo: Young man at Hagadösen in 1906. C. A. Lindvall / Riksantikvarieämbetet

One of Sweden's best-known graves from the Stone Age, built around 5,500 years ago on the island of Orust in Bohuslän.

Hagadösen is a stone chamber tomb from Neolithic on the border between Tegneby and Stala parish on the island of Orust in Bohuslän. According to the legend, it was built around 3400 BC, i.e. about 5500 years ago.

This megalithic tomb is one of the largest of its kind on the west coast. Nearby is another cairn, and 250 metres to the west of the Haga cairn is a large walkway. Today Hagadösen is high in the landscape, but at the time the grotto was erected the shoreline ran perhaps only about 10 metres below the grotto.

Hagadösen today
The Haga from the same angle today

Orust municipality describes Hagadösen as "A stately memorial to our oldest inhabitants' reverence for their dead", and also describes the archaeological survey that has been done:

The doze was investigated in 1915 by archaeologist Vilhelm Ekman. In the centre of the chamber he found a carefully laid stone structure with a round pit, covered by a flat stone. The bottom of the pit also consisted of a flat stone. Underneath this, Ekman found another pit, without stonework but with a dark, carbonaceous filling.

In the Nordic countries, the Neolithic period is the period from about 4000-1800 BC, i.e. between 3800-6000 years ago. Research in archaeology and more recent research in genetics at Uppsala and Stockholm Universities, among others, show that it was during this period that the ancestors of the Scandinavian peoples, ancestors largely shared by Swedes, Danes and Norwegians, settled and began to cultivate the Scandinavian soil.

Getting there

Hagadösen is found about 1 km east of Tegneby church.

Coordinates: Latitude 58.140506352240926 | Longitude 11.611985564231873

Discover more interesting places to visit at History map.

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