John Lee / National Museum of Denmark
Bizarre ritual practiced in Norway almost 5 thousand years ago consisted of throwing and burying stones. The secret to understanding it may lie in ancient Greenland ice.
“Sun stones” — or “solsten” in Danish — were found in large numbers in a archaeological site on the Danish island of Bornholm called Vasagård, recalls the
The first agricultural people of northern Europe, around 4900 thousand years ago, “cultivated the land and depended on the sun to bring the harvest home. If the Sun had almost disappeared due to haze in the stratosphere for long periods of time, that would have been extremely scary for them,” explains the archaeologist. Rune Iversen, from the University of Copenhagen.
This is why the Sun was the central point of these cultures. In Vasagård “the residents deposited the Sun stones in ditches which were part of an enclosure with an access road, together with the remains of ritual feasts in the form of animal bones, broken clay pots and flint objects, around 2,900 BC. The ditches were later closed”, describes the researcher .
There are around 600 stones, the size of a hand, flat and rounded. They have lines drawn from the center, which imitate the sun’s rays. According to investigators, they would be thrown and buried as form of worship of the Sun. But the story doesn’t stop there.
In fact, the authors of the published this week in Antiquity believe that all this started with a natural phenomenon.
An ice core extracted from the Greenland ice sheet provides further clues: in a layer deposited around 2900 BC, a significant amount of sulfate can be observed, a common phenomenon when a volcano erupts.
Pre-existing data on periods of low sunlight on the planet point to a century around 2900 BC as a period of low light.
It is therefore believed that the eruption of a volcano has caused a period of coolinglittle sunlight, crop failure and, consequently, fome.
“It is reasonable to believe that the Neolithic people of Bornholm wanted protect yourself of further deterioration of the climate by sacrificing sunstones — or perhaps he wanted to show hisgratitude for the fact that the sun has returned again”, argue the researchers.
The impact of this possible natural phenomenon may have been so great that it forced citizens to reorganize the space. “After the sacrifice of the sunstones, the inhabitants changed the structure of the place, so that, instead of sacrificial ditches, it now has extensive rows of palisades and circular houses of worship,” says Iversen.
“We don’t know why, but it’s reasonable to believe that the dramatic climate changes they were exposed to played a role in some way,” he concludes.
