Goseck circle
|
|
The Goseck circle is a set of concentric ditches in the district of Weissenfels in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany 75 meters (225 feet) across, that was called the earliest ritual site of Central Europe when it was first made public in August 2003. Interpretations of the ring suggest that European Neolithic and Bronze Age people measured the heavens far earlier and more accurately than scientists had imagined.
Not all precisely laid-out Neolithic and Bronze Age European religious/calendrical/astronomical circles were laid out as stone circles of megaliths or standing stones, of which Stonehenge is an atypical example. Even Stonehenge was preceded at its site a ditch and bank enclosure with later timbers, of which the postholes remain. (Nothing is more permanent than a hole in the ground, an archaeologist will tell you.)
Traces of its original configuration reveal that the Goseck ring consisted of four concentric circles, a mound, a ditch and two wooden palisades. Three sets of gates, facing southeast, southwest and north, interrupted the palisade. At the winter solstice, watchers at the center would have seen the sun rise and set through the southeast and southwest openings. The date of the circle is established in the most usual way, by potsherds at the site, whose linear designs, when compared to standard chronologies of pottery styles, suggest that the observatory was built ca 4900 BCE. Though it precedes the final stage of Stonehenge by three millennia, the press has unfortunately dubbed Goseck "the German Stonehenge." A German website, for instance, crows "Discovery of the German Stonehenge proves that the Germans were at least as advanced as the British in the Stone Age" [1] (http://www.campus-germany.de/english/10.1936.1.38.html).
The Goseck ring was identified during a season of drought by crop marks in a wheatfield, and documented by aerial photography. An aerial photo illustrates the Scientific American article linked below.
The circle at Goseck is one of more than 200 carefully dug ring-ditches that have been identified in aerial surveys, though scarcely ten per cent have been professionally investigated. Goseck is the first ring whose astronomical significance is clear. State archaeologist Harald Meller, in the first disclosure of the site, called it a milestone in archaeological research.
Though the interpretation of specific details at stone circles and rings are fought over by archaeologists on the one hand and embroidered in the dramatic universal connections made by pseudoarchaeology on the other, there is general agreement about the cultural nexus that produced them: astronomical observation combined with calendar calculations to coordinate an easily-judged lunar calendar with the more demanding measurements of a solar calendar, embodied in a spiritual religious context that was deeply meaningful in the contemporary culture. Beyond these generalities some contentious disagreement begins.
The arc between openings in the Goseck ditches corresponds closely with a (formerly) gilded arc on the rim of the Nebra skydisk found some 25 km away. (See Nebra skydisk for details.)
The site is undergoing excavation directed by Francois Bertemes and Peter Biehl of the University of Halle-Wittenberg, for a few weeks each year. In 2004 a group from the University of California Berkeley will join the ongoing dig, giving it an international scope.
External links
- Scientific American December 2003: (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000CDCCF-1783-1FA8-95ED83414B7F0000&pageNumber=1&catID=4)"Circles for space: German 'Stonehenge' marks oldest observatory." The article states "Perhaps the observatory's most curious aspect is that the roughly 100-degree span between the solstice gates corresponds with an angle on a bronze disk unearthed on a hilltop 25 kilometers away, near the town of Nebra. The Nebra disk, measuring 32 centimeters in diameter, dates from 1600 B.C. and is the oldest realistic representation of the cosmos yet found. It depicts a crescent moon, a circle that was probably the full moon, a cluster of seven stars interpreted to represent the Pleiades, scattered other stars and three arcs, all picked out in gold leaf from a background rendered violet-blue--apparently by applying rotten eggs."