In March 2026, the State Museum of Prehistory is hosting a major special exhibition entitled “The Shamaness”. It is dedicated to one of the most fascinating discoveries in European prehistory: the burial of a Middle Stone Age woman from Bad Dürrenberg who lived around 9,000 years ago and is considered a shaman according to the latest research. Her unusual grave goods and ritual traces open up new perspectives on the earliest forms of spiritual practice.
The exhibition takes its visitors on a journey of over 900 square metres into an atmospherically staged world between science and spirituality. High-ranking original artefacts from many European countries — from Israel to Sweden, from Italy to Estonia — illustrate how closely the early hunter-gatherer societies were connected. At the same time, the exhibition offers an impressive picture of the Mesolithic, an often underestimated epoch in which man learnt to adapt to the changing environmental conditions of the new warm period — a time that marks the beginning of our cultural development.
