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Hundreds of unusual discs discovered in Denmark are providing clues about how Stone Age populations reacted to a catastrophic volcanic eruption some 5,000 years ago, a new study has revealed.
Scientists discovered these small, carved stone artifacts in 1995 at a Neolithic site called Rispebgerg on the island of Bornholm, about 112 miles (180 km) southeast of Copenhagen. Because many of the disks were engraved with branching rays radiating from central circles—a recognizable image of the sun—archaeologists have dubbed the objects “sunstones,” although some feature rows of plants or crops. They were similar.
Excavations between 2013 and 2018 uncovered hundreds more sunstones at Vysagård, another Neolithic site on the island located about 6.2 miles (10 km) northwest of Raspbjerg. Most of the Vasagard sunstones were made of local shale. They were placed in pits at the same time and apparently buried on purpose, but scientists don’t know why.
Recently, researchers fit together clues pointing to the purpose of Vasagard’s burial. They examined frost traces in sediments from Germany, tree rings from Germany and the western United States, and Greenland ice cores, indicating a period of extreme climate cooling around 2900 BC. Gone – time for burial of sun stones. Sulfate concentrations in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica dating to around 2910 BC suggested that this cooling followed a volcanic eruption, the scientists reported in the journal Jan. 16. ancient.
This is comparable to the well-documented eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43 BC, which warmed the climate by about 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit. hight (7 degrees Celsius) had cooled, said study lead author Ronnie Iverson, an archaeologist. and an associate professor at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen
Eruption of Okmok, One of the biggest In the last 2500 years, triggered more than two years of unusually cold and erratic weather that destroyed crops in the Mediterranean, causing famine and disease. The result was so devastating that it is believed to hastened his downfall. The Roman Republic And the rise of the Roman Empire as a result, another team of scientists reported. In 2020.
Although little is known about the 2900 BC eruption, it is believed to have caused similar hardship, suffering and death in Neolithic Denmark, Iversen told CNN.
“This climatic event must have been devastating for them,” he said.
Iverson added that this culture was not previously known to make representational images, so the appearance of the sunstones at this time is Bornholm. It indicates an unusual and very important event for the people of
While the location of the volcano is unknown, the eruption would have spewed ash and other aerosols into the atmosphere and dimmed the sun across northern Europe, cooling the climate and mass crop losses. There will be destruction. According to the study, Stone Age farmers who depended on the sun for their crops may have carved solar designs on rocks to acknowledge their dependence on the sun, then in response to climate change. The stones should be buried as a kind of “sacrifice”.
Depending on when the burial took place, their actions may have been a ritual to revive the dim sun or to celebrate the return of the sun.
“The sunstones clearly show how important the sun was in the everyday life of Stone Age farmers,” said archaeologist and historian Janet Verberg, curator of the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.
“Everything depended on the golden disk in the sky. They looked for it to measure the time of sowing and reaping,” said Verburg, who was not involved in the research. could very well be linked to environmental catastrophe.”
Bornholm sites were not settlements. Rather, both Rispebjerg and Vasagård were places where people gathered for communal rituals. Such sites existed throughout Europe during the Neolithic period, Iverson said. According to Iversen, at Vasagård, the craters existed for at least 500 years before the Sun Stones appeared, and all the stones were found within the same layer of deposition in the craters. This placement suggested that they were collected during the same event.
“We started thinking, well, what could be causing this incident?” Iversen said. “We had images of the sun, and we also had field images and maybe crop images. So we’re thinking along the lines of some kind of natural disaster.
Once chemical analysis of the ice cores confirmed a large volcanic eruption 4,900 years ago that coincided with the burial of the sun rocks, the next step for the researchers was to see how the eruption caused climate change. How did it come? They found answers in ancient, fossilized trees from Germany and the United States.
In these trees, growth rings that date to about 2900 BC were unusually close together, indicating a poor growing season. The scientists also found the first study of sediment layers from lakes in Germany The Eiffel regionnoting that sunlight was greatly reduced around this time.
Communal rituals often reflect everyday habits, and the Stone Age farmers of Bornholm were accustomed to sowing seeds in plowed furrows. The carving of sunstones and scattering them in the pits—just as seeds were scattered in the fields during the planting season—may have been a symbolic gesture by the community in response to their climate woes,” Things grow again and crops flourish and maybe the sun appears again,” Iversen said.
Iverson added that future investigations by volcanologists could identify unknown volcanoes through chemical analysis of ancient sediments. But for archaeologists, linking volcanic eruptions to ritual burials of sunstones raises new questions about how Neolithic people interacted with the sun, Verberg added, and how such interactions may have influenced human behavior. How are cultures formed?
“Was it only on the small island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea that Stone Age people sacrificed sunstones around 2900 BC? Or was the sunstone ritual part of a larger religious movement where stones “Could this be the beginning of the Sun Age, where the great henges—such as Stonehenge—were the sun and the sky,” he asked via email. of worship So became impressive shelters? That’s a really interesting thought!”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American, and How It Works magazine.
