Volcanic eruptions related to Neolithic ‘solar stone’ sacrifices in Denmark

Credit score: Antiquity. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.217

About 4,900 years in the past, a Neolithic other people at the Danish island Bornholm sacrificed loads of stones engraved with solar and box motifs. Archaeologists and local weather scientists from the College of Copenhagen can now display that those ritual sacrifices coincided with a big volcanic eruption that made the solar disappear all over Northern Europe.

Right through historical past, volcanic eruptions have had critical penalties for human societies, together with chilly climate, loss of solar, and occasional crop yields. In 43 BC, when a volcano in Alaska spewed huge amounts of sulfur into the stratosphere, harvests failed the next years within the international locations across the Mediterranean, inflicting famine and illness. That is well-documented in written assets from historic Greece and Rome.
We do not need written assets from the Neolithic, however local weather scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute on the College of Copenhagen analyzed ice core drillings and will now record {that a} an identical volcanic eruption came about about 2,900 BC. An eruption that should have had similarly devastating penalties for the Neolithic peoples who lived in Northern Europe on the time and who have been deeply depending on agriculture.
This new perception right into a local weather episode within the Neolithic duration has led archaeologists from the College of Copenhagen, the Nationwide Museum of Denmark and the Museum of Bornholm to view their findings of so-called “solar stones” from the Neolithic Vasagård website online on Bornholm in a brand new gentle. Their findings at the phenomenon are revealed within the magazine Antiquity.
“Now we have recognized for a very long time that the solar was once the focus for the early agricultural cultures we all know of in Northern Europe. They farmed the land and depended at the solar to deliver house the harvest. If the solar virtually disappeared because of mist within the stratosphere for longer classes of time, it will had been extraordinarily scary for them,” says archaeologist Dr. Rune Iversen from the College of Copenhagen, who has participated within the excavations on the website online led via the Museum of Bornholm and the Nationwide Museum.

“One form of to find this is utterly distinctive to Bornholm are the so-called solar stones, which can be flat shale items with engraved patterns and solar motifs. They symbolized fertility and have been almost definitely sacrificed to verify solar and expansion. Solar stones have been present in huge amounts on the Vasagård West website online, the place citizens deposited them in ditches forming a part of a causewayed enclosure along with the stays of formality feasts within the type of animal bones, damaged clay vessels, and flint items round 2,900 BC. The ditches have been due to this fact closed,” he provides.
Dr. Iversen and his colleagues consider that there’s a very prime likelihood that there’s a connection between the volcanic eruption, the next local weather adjustments and the invention of the ritual solar stone sacrifices.
“It’s cheap to consider that the Neolithic other people on Bornholm sought after to give protection to themselves from additional deterioration of the local weather via sacrificing solar stones—or in all probability they sought after to turn their gratitude that the solar had returned once more.”
As though an acute local weather deterioration round 2,900 BC was once now not sufficient, Northern Ecu Neolithic cultures have been additionally suffering from different failures. New DNA research of human bones have proven that the plague was once very well-liked and deadly.
Right through the similar duration when the Neolithic other people have been suffering from each local weather alternate and illness, archaeologists too can record a shift within the traditions they’d held directly to for a very long time. The so-called Funnel Beaker Tradition, which were dominant till about 5,000 years in the past with its function ceramics and passage graves, was once steadily disappearing.
“On the causewayed enclosure we now have excavated on Bornholm, we will be able to additionally see that, after the sacrifice of the solar stones, the citizens modified the construction of the website online in order that as an alternative of sacrificial ditches, it was once supplied with intensive rows of palisades and round cult homes,” Dr. Iversen concludes. “We have no idea why, however it’s cheap to consider that the dramatic climatic adjustments they’d been uncovered to would have performed a task by some means.”

Additional information:
Solar stones and the darkened solar: Neolithic miniature artwork from the island of Bornholm, Denmark. Antiquity. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.217

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Volcanic eruptions related to Neolithic ‘solar stone’ sacrifices in Denmark (2025, January 16)
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