The mammoth hunting ground under a future Czech courthouse

Construction crews in the Czech Republic were digging the foundations of a new courthouse when the ground handed them a case no courtroom could have argued. In the Bukov district of the northern Bohemian city of Ústí nad Labem, archaeologists have uncovered a mammoth hunting ground containing the remains of at least twenty woolly mammoths, left behind by Late Gravettian hunter-gatherers around 27,000 years ago.

The find surfaced in November 2024, when routine archaeological monitoring of the construction earthworks turned up bones that clearly were not modern. Systematic excavations through 2025, led by the Institute of Archaeology in Brno together with local heritage specialists, opened up the mammoth hunting ground across roughly 1,000 square metres, about the size of four tennis courts. Sealed in silt, the dig yielded more than 3,500 animal remains. The results were published in a 2026 study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, as reported by The Daily Galaxy.

Bones That Tell a Hunt Story

This mammoth hunting ground kept almost everything the hunters left behind. Nineteen lower jaws and one isolated tooth set the minimum head count, and nearly every part of the skeletons survived except the skulls and tusks, which the hunters most likely carried off, since mammoth ivory was a prized raw material for tools and personal ornaments. Alongside the giants lay woolly rhinoceroses, horses, reindeer and hares, the cast of a cold open steppe that would be unrecognizable as the forested Bohemia of today.

The evidence of human hands at this mammoth hunting ground is direct. Cut marks score several ribs, and microscopic analysis found flint traces still sharp on the bone surfaces, as if made yesterday. Eight stone implements turned up, including backed bladelets and projectile flakes, the toolkit of a well-equipped hunting party. The age profile argues for hunting over scavenging: more than half the animals were still-growing adults between thirteen and twenty-seven years old, prime targets unlikely to die together by accident, and the bone condition points to fresh carcasses butchered on the spot.

A Timeline Buried in Silt

Chance gave the first hint. That November, monitors watching the courthouse earthworks spotted the bones; in 2025, the Brno-based team returned for a full excavation; and in 2026, the peer-reviewed paper made the mammoth hunting ground official, according to the study published in the journal. The future has already been decided: the new courthouse will be built directly over the ancient camp, so judges and juries will one day deliberate above the mammoth hunting ground, a brand-new seat of justice over one of the oldest camps in Bohemia.

More Than a Slaughterhouse

Four fire pits, spotted by the charcoal they left behind, held the camp's human warmth. Radiocarbon dating of that charcoal places human activity at the mammoth hunting ground between 28,800 and 25,600 years before present. Around the bones, the team also found red ochre plaques and a pendant carved from mammoth ivory, evidence of symbolic and cultural life alongside the daily work of butchery. According to BioScience, the researchers describe the find as an exceptional window into the bond between humans and the giant animals that once dominated the European landscape.

Why This Mammoth Hunting Ground Fills a Gap

Comparable Gravettian mammoth-bone deposits were already known from Moravia, Lower Austria and southern Poland, but nothing similar had ever been documented in Bohemia, and later-period examples are rare. That makes this mammoth hunting ground a geographic and temporal outlier, the first of its kind in the region. Ongoing study of the sediments and tools could reveal how the camp was used season by season, and how its people organized one of the largest collective hunts of the European Ice Age, joining other Ice Age finds now emerging from unlikely places, like the ancient arrows coming out of Norway's melting mountains.

And there is an irony that will outlive the dig itself. A courthouse, a monument to rules, evidence and verdicts, is about to rise over a mammoth hunting ground where ancient hunters read tracks, weighed evidence of a very different kind and delivered their own verdicts on the glacial steppe. For anyone who has ever walked past a construction site and wondered what lies beneath, Bukov now has an answer: thousands of bones, a lost campfire culture, and proof that the ground under our newest buildings has very old stories to tell. Explore more finds in The Old World.