Stone plaques with sun motifs found on the Danish island of Bornholm
Antiquity Publications/John Lee, National Museum of Denmark
Because hundreds of mysterious “sunstone” engravings found in Denmark may have been ceremonially buried. volcanic eruption Around 2900 the sun disappeared.
A total of 614 stone tablets and fragments of tablets engraved with decorative motifs of the sun or plants have been found in recent years. Vasagård West archaeological site on the Danish island of Bornholm. They were found in a layer about 4900 years ago, when Neolithic people the area was being farmed and the enclosures surrounded by banks and ditches were being built.
Most of the worked sunstones were found in ditches around these enclosures and were covered by a stone pavement containing pottery fragments and other items. The pottery is typical of the late Inbutu Beaker culture, which existed in this region until about 2900 to 2800 Ka.
It was originally proposed to bury the stone carvings of the sun to ensure good harvests. The sun was the focus of the first farming cultures in northern Europe, he says Rune Iversen at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
“But why did they put all those pictures up at once?” Iversen asks. “Basically, the last thing they did here was put these sunstones and then cover them with bits of animal bones, all the artifacts and stuff like that. And we see this repeated from trench to trench. So it’s a kind of action or event.”
Now, he and his colleagues have the answer. They analyzed data from ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica and found higher concentrations of sulfate, which is deposited in the years following a volcanic eruption around 2900 Ka.
The relative proportions of sulfate deposits in Greenland and Antarctica mean the eruption was close to the equator, the researchers say, and its effects appear to have covered a large area. Ash clouds may have blocked the sun, dropping temperatures for years.
A period of severe cooling around 2900 ka is confirmed by preserved hardwood tree rings in Germany’s Main River Valley and by long-lived bristlecone pines in the western US.
The eruption would have been devastating for the Neolithic peoples of northern Europe. “If you don’t have a crop and you don’t get a crop in, you won’t have anything to plant next year,” says Iversen. “They must have felt quite punished at the time, because it’s just an endless disaster coming at them.”
He and his colleagues say the burying of the carvings may have been an attempt or a celebration to bring back the sun after the sky finally cleared.
“That’s a good explanation,” he says Jens Winther Johannsen Roskilde Museum in Denmark. “You can be sure that demanding agricultural societies must rely on the sun.”
Lars Larsson At Lund University in Sweden, he asks why we only have evidence of this behavior on Bornholm, and not elsewhere in southern Scandinavia, if the climate effect was widespread.
It could be because people there had plenty of hard stone (slate) to carve sun images, but much of the rest of southern Scandinavia is mostly clay, so there’s no suitable stone for carving, says Iversen. “Engravings could also be made on pieces of wood or leather elsewhere”, he says, but these would not generally be preserved.
Alternatively, it could reflect cultural differences, says Johannsen. “These societies are not isolated, but you are more isolated on an island, and that could be why they developed a unique practice and culture.”
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