A volcanic eruption in 2910 B.C. will be the purpose Neolithic folks on a small island within the Baltic Sea buried tons of of stones adorned with plant and solar imagery, archaeologists counsel in a brand new examine.
“We have now recognized for a very long time that the solar was the focus for the early agricultural cultures we all know of in Northern Europe,” Rune Iversen, an archaeologist on the College of Copenhagen, stated in a assertion. These stones “had been in all probability sacrificed to make sure solar and development.”
In a examine revealed Thursday (Jan. 16) within the journal Antiquity, Iversen and colleagues detailed the invention of 614 stone plaques and plaque fragments on the Danish island of Bornholm, positioned south of Sweden within the Baltic Sea. The objects had been discovered scattered all through a palisade ditch. Primarily based on the pottery type and the radiocarbon dates from charcoal discovered close by, the researchers concluded that the adorned stones had been intentionally positioned there round 2900 B.C.
The overwhelming majority of the stone plaques had been made out of black shale — a darkish, flaky sedimentary rock discovered on the island — whereas others had been made out of quartz and flint. Many of the plaques had been additionally adorned with incised designs, together with solar and plant motifs.
Though a handful of those “solar stones” have been discovered on Bornholm beforehand, the massive variety of them present in one place spurred the researchers to hunt a possible purpose for the distinctive deposit.
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Neolithic folks seem to have buried the stones at a crucial juncture, because the researchers found that the world was reworked right into a extra strong, fortified website simply after the stones had been deposited. Maybe a pure catastrophe or climatic occasion that prompted crops to fail triggered the stone “sacrifice,” the researchers prompt of their examine.
Primarily based on intensive proof of prehistoric local weather occasions, the researchers made a connection between the burial of the stones and a volcanic eruption in 2910 B.C. that nearly definitely negatively affected climate and harvests throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
“These depositions may have been made throughout a time of stress with the aim of bringing again the solar and re-establishing agricultural manufacturing,” the researchers wrote of their examine. “They may even have been made when the local weather disaster was over, as an act of celebration for the return of the solar.”
After the stone deposit, a brand new type of tradition started on Bornholm, the researchers defined within the examine. Individuals stopped constructing large tombs, started creating extra fortified settlements, and shaped new social networks with folks in Scandinavia. However the significance of the solar could not have diminished, as Neolithic societies throughout Europe relied on the solar for his or her harvest.
“It’s fairly merely an unbelievable discovery, which demonstrates that depositions honouring the solar is an historical phenomenon, which we encounter once more in South Scandinavia throughout the local weather catastrophe attributable to a volcanic eruption within the 12 months 536 AD,” examine co-author Lasse Vilien Sørensen, an archaeologist on the Nationwide Museum of Denmark, stated within the assertion.
