Archaeologists Explore Mysterious Underwater Cairns at Lake Constance

Heritage Daily ^ | November 18, 2022 | Markus Milligan

[SunkenCiv]

Lake Constance is a 63km-long central European lake... formed by the Rhine Glacier during the ice age and is a Zungenbecken or tongue basin lake.

No evidence of Palaeolithic finds have been found in the vicinity, but archaeologists have previously discovered stone tools (microliths) and hunting camps, suggesting that Mesolithic hunter gatherers frequented the area without settling.

Neolithic activity dates from the middle and late Neolithic, when the so-called pile dwelling and wetland settlements were established on Lake Überlingen (Lower Lake Constance), the Constance Hopper (a bay in Lake Constance) and on the Obersee (Upper Lake Constance).

In 2015, a 20 km line of 170 man-made underwater stone cairns was discovered by the Institute for Lake Research in Langenargen, when measuring the depths of the lake on the south-west shore between Bottighofen and Romanshorn.

Preliminary studies revealed that the cairns form a line 200 metres parallel from the lake shore, with each cairn up to thirty metres in diameter and almost two metres high. The cairns sit on a layer of lake sediment, which was deposited after the retreat of the Rhine glacier more than 10,000 years ago.

As part of a new study, archaeologists have been using an excavator to remove material around one of the cairns to see the layer structure from the bottom of the lake to the stone layer. The team has already found a piece of wood that shows primitive traces of processing by humans, which the researchers are using as one of many indicators to date the monument.

Construction of the cairn has been placed to around 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, as has a second cairn the team have examined, indicating that the line of 170 cairns may possibly date from the same period.

[SunkenCiv]

The may have been related to fishing, either the mechanics of it, or as a fishing rights marker for the various fishermen (or fisherpeople, for the woke readers out there).

[SunkenCiv]

I forget (I’ve been reading a lot the past couple of days) but these probably got attributed to a “ceremonial purpose”. Archaeologists of the distant future will have the same impression when they find lawn dwarfs and flamingos near the ruins of a house.

The dating was made possible by the wood recovered from under one of the cairns.

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[going hot]

fisherpeople...fishheads