Posted on 12/21/2005 11:02:02 AM PST by blam
Germany to reopen 6,800-year-old mystery circle
20 December 2005
BERLIN - At the winter solstice this week, Germany is to open a replica of a mysterious wooden circle that is believed to be a temple of the sun built by a lost culture 6,800 years ago.
The circle of posts, in a flat river plain at Goseck south of Berlin, has mystified scientists since its discovery in 1991 by an archaeologist studying the landscape from the air. An excavation found post holes and what may be the remains of ritual fires.
Goseck has been dubbed the German Stonehenge, though it is twice as old as the Stonehenge megalithic circle in southern England and has no stones. The original wood rotted away long ago, but new palisades, or wooden walls, were constructed
at Goseck this year.
In a public works scheme, 2,300 oaken poles were erected in a circle on the same site over a seven-month period, with gateways opening to the points of the compass where the sun rises and sets on December 21.
There are now two concentric wooden palisades, each 2.5 metres high, as well as a ditch and an earthen wall.
A winter solstice festival with flaming torches and laser lights for an audience of thousands is to take place Wednesday as the sun sets over the southwest gate of the 75-metre-diameter circle.
The Goseck Circle was apparently erected by Europe's first civilization, long before the cultures of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt, and is one of the best studied of 150 monumental sites arrayed through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia.
Each comprises four concentric rings of earth and wood, indicating a common culture using a standard design.
The realization that a very early European farming people built such vast sites has arrived in little more than a decade. Textbooks that assume late Stone Age Europe was far more primitive than the Middle East must be rewritten.
Archaeologists know nothing of the appearance or language of the people and can only surmise about their religious beliefs. The culture is known only as that of stroke-ornamented ceramic ware, from fragments of pottery it left.
The jars and bowls had their decoration jabbed into the soft clay with a kind of fork to form zig-zag lines. The whole period of stroke-ornamented pottery is limited to 4900 to 4650 BC.
The Goseck Circle is claimed to have been a sort of calendar that told the people farming the fertile plain when it was time to begin counting the days till spring planting. But it may also have served as a marketplace and a place of refuge in times of war.
Francois Bertemes, who heads the prehistoric archaeology institute at nearby Halle-Wittenberg University, claims the site marks the start of world astronomy and surmises that it was a place of fertility rituals that would have included weddings.
Excavation of the 6,000-square-metre site found two "sacrificial" pits containing fragments of human bone. There was evidence of a very hot fire in both, but the ash had been removed, which Bertemes sees as a sign that humans were sacrificed.
The dig also turned up hundreds of pottery fragments and cattle bones.
Bertemes' views remain controversial.
Christoph Heiermann, spokesman for the Saxony state archaeological service, said this year that the purpose of the quadruple enclosures, which inspired his agency's new four-ring publicity logo, is still unknown.
"We prefer to just speak of central places where people gathered. We don't know what they did there. Maybe they were temples. Or markets," he said. The scientific community had not yet accepted that Goseck was an observatory.
Bus tours of Stone Age and Bronze Age sites are already coming through Goseck, which is only 25 kilometres from the German town of Nebra, where an extraordinary bronze-and-gold map of the heavens dating from 3,600 years ago was discovered in 1999.
Oppenheimer suspects these people came from the east, possibly Sundaland. Apparently, there are many references about the wise men from the east too.
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. Thanks.7,000-Year-Old Clay Found in GermanyWorkers digging on Monday for a new gas pipeline outside of Dresden came across the figure, which measures eight centimeters (three inches), said Judith Oexle, an archaeologist for the state of Saxony. The figure, which details a male body from the waist to the calves, is the first such representation of a man to be found in the area, believed to date from 5,000 B.C.
August 25 2003
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I just love the way they find new information and have to rewrite all their previous theories.
Whoops, missed ya.
Sounds like a fortification to me.
It's where they ritually stored their dedicated god-water grain. The fire remains are where they purified it for presentation to the spirits of the fermentation vat.
The fortifications were to prevent defiling by keeping out raids by wild women bent on gathering feed for their large, sacred rats.
There it is. Scientific proof.
I was thinking it was where the people that migrated East to become the Arabs gathered to hump goats, but you really put me in my place.
If you mean created by a white man, then yes.
"As Winter arrives this week" would have worked just as well, Druid-boy.
(Do you ever post anything but anti-Christian bashings? I don't think I've ever seen you post anything else)
I'm perplexed. but it's been a long day.
"I thought that burned-out circular depression looked strange..."
Zooul, is that you?
The henge showed up as dark ridges in a wheat field in a 1991 aerial photograph of the site... A magnetometer survey confirmed the anomaly. Analysis shows that the southeast entrance to the henge marked the winter solstice and that the southwest gate was aligned to the summer solstice. Though some archaeologists question the intepretation, Biehl believes the site was a kind of solar observatory. (Courtesy LfA)
There's a very good article on this subject in the July/August edition of Archaeology magazine.
That's where the update came from. :')
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