Ancient, engraved stones may have been buried to summon the sun

As a volcanic eruption darkened the sun roughly 4,900 years within the past, a Stone Age tradition sacrificed a entire lot of embellished stone plaques to are trying to coax it encourage.

A trove of engraved stones unearthed from ritual gathering sites on Bornholm, an island in Denmark, ticket motifs that practically all recurrently symbolize the sun and croplike vegetation. What’s extra, an prognosis of ice cores aspects to a volcanic eruption spherical the time the stones had been intentionally buried. Taken together, the evidence suggests the stones’ burial may own been linked to the presumably cataclysmic tournament, archaeologist Rune Iversen and colleagues file January 15 in Antiquity.

“The predominance of sun and plant motifs is striking,” says Alison Sheridan, an archaeologist at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh who used to be now not serious referring to the learn. “These stones are considered as a form of prayer or invocation for the sun to arrangement encourage, and for vegetation to grow all all over again.”

Iversen’s crew stumbled on the series of over 600 embellished stones between 2013 and 2018, in ritual gathering sites belief to own been constructed by the Funnel Beaker tradition. These folk seem to own carved out and refilled diverse ditches over about a century. Around 2900 B.C., they scattered sun stones across the land admire seeds in a self-discipline, sealed the ditches and constructed diverse spherical wooden structures on high.

“It is moderately special that every and every person amongst a surprising we own all these stones, and also you don’t stare them from sooner than or later,” says Iversen, of the University of Copenhagen. This led Iversen’s crew to carry out the burial used to be based on a valuable incident.

After ruling out picture voltaic eclipses, the researchers grew to change into to ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which point out traces of a volcanic eruption spherical 2910 B.C. that can own potentially resulted in world cooling and affected harvests. Lake sediments from Germany additionally hint at drastically reduced sunlight spherical this time, while tree rings from Germany and the US imply diverse incidents of frost all through boost seasons.

“The assemblage is certainly excellent in phrases of quality and quantity,” says archaeologist Marc Vander Linden of Bournemouth University in England. But he is cautious about a causal link between the burials and volcanic activity. “A precedence will most definitely be to position an instruct to at a rare better chronological window, to glimpse if this duration items a tell environmental signature equivalent to the next incidence of less warm snaps.”

It’s unclear which volcano erupted, though discovering its location may shed gentle on its broader affect, Iversen says. The timing of the deposit coincides with the dwindling of the Funnel Beaker tradition and in vogue social upheaval across Europe.

“Provided that the effects of the volcanic activity will own been felt over unprecedented of the Northern Hemisphere,” Sheridan says, “this makes one wonder what varied reactions there may own been to it in other locations.”