Herxheim was a settlement of the Linearbandkeramik (LBK or Linear Pottery) culture, the first farmers in central Europe. The LBK was founded in Hungary and Bohemia around 5500 BCE by immigrants from the Balkans, and it then spread across modern Austria and Germany to France and the Low Countries. Herxheim was founded around 5300 BCE. As the plan above shows, only part of the site was excavated (because it was in the way of a new industrial park). Archaeologists later came back to do some more work, but they found that the eastern end seems to have eroded away.The settlement was surrounded by a double ditch, which did not look deep or wide enough to provide much defense. The ditch is unusual, and suggests that from the beginning this was a special place. Besides the ditch, though, the settlement looks pretty ordinary through most of its history.