Hundreds of years in the past, folks on what’s now the Danish island of Bornholm threw a whole bunch of mysteriously carved stones right into a ditch earlier than burying them.
The aim of those so-called ‘solar stones’, and the explanations for throwing them into ditches en masse, have been one thing of a thriller – however historic ice excavated from Greenland might have the reply.
Some 4,900 years in the past, a volcano erupted so massively that it might have blotted out the Solar – prompting the ritual sacrifice of solar stones in a bid to revive it.
“We’ve recognized for a very long time that the Solar was the point of interest for the early agricultural cultures we all know of in Northern Europe,” says archaeologist Rune Iversen from the College of Copenhagen.
“They farmed the land and relied on the Solar to deliver residence the harvest. If the Solar nearly disappeared as a result of mist within the stratosphere for longer durations of time, it might have been extraordinarily horrifying for them.”
Solar stones – or “solsten” in Danish – have been present in nice numbers at an archaeological web site on Bornholm referred to as Vasagård. The location, in use between round 3500 BCE and 2700 BCE, is assumed to have been a spiritual advanced; extra particularly a spot of Solar worship, because the entrances to the advanced line up with the Solar on the time of the solstices.
Buried in ditches subsequent to a causeway that runs via the positioning, archaeologists have excavated greater than 600 entire or fragmented solar stones. These are largely palm-sized, often flat, rounded stones which can be engraved with traces that radiate out from heart, just like the rays of the Solar, though there’s some variation within the form of the stone and the patterns engraved upon them.
Taken collectively, they symbolize hours upon hours of painstaking carving. Such deliberate work should have had a objective, and archaeologists imagine that this objective was non secular, in regards to the Solar, fertility, and development.
“Solar stones had been present in massive portions on the Vasagård West web site,” Iversen says, “the place residents deposited them in ditches forming a part of a causewayed enclosure along with the stays of formality feasts within the type of animal bones, damaged clay vessels, and flint objects round 2900 BCE. The ditches had been subsequently closed.”
The clustering of those stones in time and house suggests a selected objective or occasion. Iversen and his colleagues imagine that they’ve recognized what that occasion may be in an ice core extracted from the Greenland ice sheet, annual sediment layers from historic lakebeds, and tree rings that shaped across the identical time.
Within the ice core, in a layer deposited round 2900 BCE, a major quantity of sulfate might be seen, a signature that’s seen when a volcano massively erupts, and its ejecta settles onto an ice sheet and is buried by subsequent ice layers.
Annual sediment layers from Germany, referred to as varves, point out two durations of low daylight, with one considerably occurring round 2900 BCE. And tree ring information from bristlecone pines within the western US present very skinny rings across the identical time interval – related to very chilly, dry circumstances.
We all know that giant sufficient volcanic eruptions can trigger widespread issues for a number of years, resembling a interval of cooling, low daylight, crop failure, and subsequent famine. All these traces of proof, Iversen and his workforce imagine, level to a connection between a volcanic occasion and the solar stones at Vasagård.
“It’s affordable to imagine that the Neolithic folks on Bornholm wished to guard themselves from additional deterioration of the local weather by sacrificing solar stones – or maybe they wished to point out their gratitude that the Solar had returned once more,” he says.
There’s yet one more vital clue. Within the years following the deposition of the stones, the design of the positioning modified considerably. On the identical time, plague ravaged the area, and the tradition was present process a significant shift as mass migration happened throughout Europe.
If the devastation wrought by a volcanic eruption had come and gone, and with different massive adjustments occurring, it is not a big leap to deduce that the altering wants of the locals led to the rejigging of their gathering house.
“After the sacrifice of the solar stones, the residents modified the construction of the positioning in order that as a substitute of sacrificial ditches it was supplied with in depth rows of palisades and round cult homes,” Iversen says.
“We have no idea why, however it’s affordable to imagine that the dramatic climatic adjustments they’d been uncovered to would have performed a task indirectly.”
The analysis has been printed in Antiquity.
