Last fall I visited the Valais region of Switzerland near the border of Italy to work on a magazine assignment for Montecristo magazine about the Swiss Wine Route Hiking Trail—a multi-day trekking route through vineyards in the Rhone Valley.

In the city of Sion, after one of many wine-tasting sessions and a light lunch of raclette, my local guide and I (both a bit tipsy) hiked down the mountainside towards our next destination in the centre of town. Along one of the main thoroughfares we came across a huge workers’ tent pitched atop a former parking lot. When I asked about the tent, my guide said it was the site of an archaeological dig and suggested we go look inside.

There, we discovered a team of archaeologists excavating what I later learned was the Don Bosco necropolis, an extraordinary prehistoric burial ground in Sion’s Platta district. Archaeological work at the site, carried out intermittently since 1999, ultimately uncovered nearly 150 graves and around 50 burial mounds, most dating from the ninth to fifth centuries B.C. Flamur Dalloshi, the lead archaeologist from Albania, told us the burial ground dates from prehistoric times, but that the skeletons of interest, he added, were from circa 1,000 B.C.

Several months earlier Dalloshi had become a minor local celebrity after helping uncover an extraordinary warrior’s grave containing, among other things, a sword with an ivory pommel, a spearhead, a razor, pottery and scores of bronze ornaments. Most of the skeletons uncovered in that part of the cemetery, he told us, belonged to women and children of the elite, a pattern that had led the archaeologists to wonder whether women occupied an unusually powerful position in the society.

He invited us to take a closer look at the remains still being excavated. If you look closely at this skeleton on the left, you can see bits of clothing and jewellery just behind the back of the skull – and to the left of the mid-section (a belt).

When I asked him what was the most surprising thing he’d discovered, he replied that in some graves his team had found pottery with hollow tubes or hoses running into them extending upwards to the surface. It was so that the living could provide the dead with water in their eternal repose.

Being a bit of a purist hiker, preferring long stretches of uninterrupted wilderness, I’d always avoided trails that wove through both nature and towns—as many do in the UK for example. But experiencing the serendipity of finding the archaeological dig in Sion, as well as several other encounters I had on the stops in towns on the Swiss Wine Route, has instilled in me a greater appreciation of the variety of experience these sorts of trails offer. Having the uniformity of the environment on a hike like this broken up is akin to watching stage scenes change during a theatre performance.

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Afterword: What Archaeologists Found Later

The story of the site did not end with my visit. In 2018, as archaeologists were completing their excavation of the Don Bosco necropolis, they uncovered something unexpected beneath it: enormous stone slabs belonging to a Neolithic dolmen dating from around 3000 B.C. The monument may once have contained the remains of more than a hundred people. It seems that beneath the Iron Age cemetery we’d stumbled upon was an even older burial ground.