Are you the Gatekeeper?
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.
GGG Ping.
It would be funny if this was in reality in acient ritual to reanimate a giant three-headed beast, which then proceeds to eat all the participants.
Finally! Getting back to the roots of the holiday. Happy Solstice!
THEY HAVE BROKEN THE SEAL! WE ARE DOOMED!!!
Where is the protector? Now the portal is OPEN!!!!
Will it be televised by Geraldo?
Yeah..... and when they open it.... it's says " YOU LIBERAL IDIOTS "
Isn't this the place where Kwaanza originated????????
"It would be funny if this was in reality in acient ritual to reanimate a giant three-headed beast, which then proceeds to eat all the participants."
It is, and the beast is called Islam.
Crop circle cookie cutter.
OMG...ROTFLMAO!
That'd be sweet, hopefully it would work its way to France :D
Pictures?
Are you the Gatekeeper?
The long-sought origins of the All You Can Eat buffet restaurant?
There apparently a major civilization in northern Europe way back then, and whoever they were remains a mystery. They did venture on the high seas. There are also artifacts, a large dock in western Africa for one, that may be from the same civilization, and it is possible that the first civilization in Mesopotamia, which came quickly from nothing to cities with agriculture, was founded by these people.
Is it not a coincidence that the game, "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" is illegal in Germany? The main theme nearly parallels the actions of these Germans.
No. Its where Pilsner Urquell was invented.
Ancient stone Swastika?
Oh, that is it, laugh, they all laugh before their souls get swallowed.
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