Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeologists discovered a highly public Roman mound tomb in Bavaria, a rare find for the area.
• The somewhat flashy location of the tomb along a highly trafficked road showed the importance of the tomb’s owner.
• The tomb likely had a statue alongside it at one point.

During a routine water retention project in the Bavarian countryside at Wolkertshofen in Germany, archaeologists spent the bulk of their excavation sifting through a few unremarkable pottery fragments. Then came something that completely surprised the experts and opened a new world of exploration: a rare Roman burial mound.

The discovery began when they located a stone circle adjacent to an old Roman road. Inside it? A gaping void.

Present-day Wolkertshofen sits in the Eichstätt district, but the site is known as a hotbed of history. It played host to a series of settlements, with past evidence pointing to people from the Neolithic period, the Bronze and Iron ages, the Roman Imperial period, and the early Middle Ages all living nearby. Since this new construction project was within a known archaeological area, it required experts on site. That allowed a piece of the former Roman province Raetia to come to life.

During the early stages of the effort, the team found traces of prehistoric settlements through ceramic fragments. Then came the Roman burial mound, known as a tumulus, a rarity for the area. Crews first found a 40-foot-wide stone foundation, completely round, carefully and purposefully placed in a circle. Adjoining the south side of the circle was a square extension, measuring roughly six feet by six feet, that experts believe may have served as the foundation for some sort of statue.

The experts say there’s little doubt to the original intention of the site. The stone circle formed the peripheral wall of a tumulus from the Roman period.

“We hadn’t expected to discover a funerary monument of this age and size here,” Mathias Pfeil, general conservator of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation, said in a translated statement. “The tumulus was located directly on an important Roman traffic route, and the family used it to create a widely visible memorial for a deceased person. The tomb was both a place of remembrance and an expression of social status.”

The tumulus tradition started in Central Europe and Italy, but moved north beginning in the first century C.E. In the Bavarian region, the burial mounds mix with older Bronze and Iron age burial structures, leading to speculation that some groups, especially the Celtic, embraced pre-Roman customs to keep from following Roman trends.

Still, with such pomp and circumstance to the tumulus, located on a heavily trafficked road and likely with an adjacent statue at some point, this was nothing more than a “false grave.” No skeletons or grave goods were found inside, leading the team to classify it as a “cenotaph,” a symbolic tomb that likely commemorated the death of someone who was buried elsewhere. The location directly on the Roman road leading into the Altmuühl Valley from Nassenfels and its proximity to a Roman country estate only support the theory.

Crews will continue to search the area for additional Roman-era finds, and possibly additional tumulus locations. Just don’t expect any to come with quite as much dramatic flair.