Tag: Stonehenge Altar Stone

Archaeology News for September 2024: More Evidence that Stone Age People were very Sophisticated in some ways. 

The Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age was that time in Prehistory when we humans first began the transition from hunter gatherer clans to agricultural societies. It was also the time therefore when some peoples settled down to live in permanent ‘villages’ instead of living as nomads moving from place to place with the seasons as the local resources ripened.

The Neolithic or new stone age was a time of tremendous change as humans first began to grow crops, domesticate animals and live in settled communities. (Credit: SciTechDaily)

And once humans began to live permanently in one place they could begin to build, not just villages in which to live but also monuments to honour their gods or record some important event. It is well known from anthropology that by building such monuments those people were also saying ‘This is our Land!” In this post I will be talking about several of such Neolithic structures and as usual I will start with the oldest first and then move forward in time.

Perhaps the best known of the monolithic structures built during the neolithic is Stonehenge in England. We’re still arguing over what it was used for! (Credit: English Heritage)

Göbekli Tepe is in fact considered to be the oldest stone structure known to archaeology, see my post of July 5th 2017. The site is located in southern Turkey and has been dated to more than 11,000 years ago; the name by the way means ‘Potbelly Hill’ in Turkish.  The site consists of a series of oval stone walls with large ‘T’ shaped pillars inside the ovals. Both the pillars and some of the walls are covered by carvings, many of the carvings are those of local animals while others appear to be abstract symbols. The site is undergoing almost constant excavation and it is expected that many more discoveries are waiting to be unearthed.

Some of the structures unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, the oldest known ‘temple’ discovered by science. Archaeologists are certain that much remains to still be discovered. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The motive behind the building of Göbekli Tepe is of course unknown after all these thousands of years but that hasn’t stopped archaeologists from trying out various theories. The temple like layout of the site certainly suggests that it could have been used as a place of worship, perhaps the animals craved into stone were sacred totems of some sort. Another possibility is that the structures were built as a calendar, that is some way the pillars and carvings could be used to keep track of the seasons. In an agricultural society being able to know when to plant and when to harvest is of the greatest importance.

This is the calendar used by the ancient Mayans. Their calendar was so accurate that even the Aztecs many centuries later still used it! (Credit: Jake Jackson’s These Fantastic Worlds)

A new study in the journal Time and Mind by archaeologists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland has developed evidence supporting the idea of Göbekli Tepe being a calendar. At the same time the paper further suggests that the building of the site was a response to an astronomical event that occurred a thousand years before the earliest known part of Göbekli Tepe was built. This event occurred sometime around 10,800 BCE when an asteroid or comet fragment is known from geological evidence to have struck the island of Greenland triggering a worldwide ‘mini-ice age’. This drastic change in the climate is thought to have contributed to the extinction of large fauna such as the Wooly Mammoth and Saber Toothed Tiger.

The extinction of large ice age animals like the Wholly Mammoth is currently being thought to have been caused by an asteroid strike similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs only smaller and just 12,800 years ago. (Credit: The Irish Sun)

The evidence for Göbekli Tepe being a calendar comes from an interpretation ‘V’ shaped carvings on pillar 43 in the largest enclosure. The V shaped carvings appear to be arranged to record a lunar month of 29 or 30 days, below the V’s are squares that appear to represent the number of lunar months in a year plus another 10 V’s to make up for the extra time needed to get to 364 days. Finally there is a bird like figure with a V around its neck that the paper asserts represents the summer solstice bringing the total number of days to 365, the right number of days for a year. Using the carvings on the pillar could allow the ancient people of Göbekli Tepe to keep track of both the lunar months and a solar year.

The calendar carved into Göbekli Tepe. By repeating each cycle in turn all of the days of a year could be kept track of. (Credit: Sci.News)

The evidence for Göbekli Tepe being a record of the comet strike was found at the top of the same pillar which according to the article depicts a meteor swarm emanating from the constellations of Aquarius and Pisces. That is the location in the sky that is thought to be where the comet strike came from. According to Dr. Martin Sweatman, co-author of the study, “This event might have triggered civilization by initiating a new religion and by motivating developments in agriculture to cope with the cold climate.” In any case the event must have had a profound effect of people throughout the world and could well have inspired the people of Göbekli Tepe to try to record it somehow.

The top part of the same pillar, the so-called ‘Three Handbags’ is thought to record the destruction caused by the asteroid strike in 12,800 years ago. I have to admit that’s a bit of a stretch for me! (Credit: The New York Times)

While we’re on the subject of ancient stone monuments there’s some news about the best known such structure, Stonehenge. Back in my post of 30 December 2023, I discussed how recent research had revealed that one of the most important of the so-called ‘bluestones’ at Stonehenge, the altar stone, was chemically so different from the other bluestones that it could not have come from the same quarry in Wales as the other bluestones did. So the hunt was on to find the place of origin for the altar stone.

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge on the left. Chemically different from the other ‘Bluestones’ at Stonehenge scientists have been searching from the location from where it came. (Credit: CNN)

Now a Ph.D. student in geology from Curtin University in Australia named Anthony Clarke has announced that he has traced the altar stone back to its source in northern Scotland. According to Mr. Clarke, who grew up in Wales not far from the quarry where the other bluestones came from, the altar stone is chemically identical to sedimentary rocks from the Orcadian basin nearly 700 kilometers from Stonehenge in northern Scotland.

If Mister Clarke is correct then the Altar Stone came from the very northern tip of Scotland. This image shows a land route the stone could have taken but a sea route is also possible. (Credit: The US Sun)

So after having solved the mystery of where the altar stone came from we now have to figure out how it got to Stonehenge, and why was a rock from so far away used there anyway. The terrain in northern Scotland is rather rugged even today so the 5,000 kilogram stone was probably brought by water, still a difficult undertaking in a culture that had not yet invented the wheel.

The neolithic period is also the time when people first began to build boats for fishing and trade. Was the Altar Stone brought from Scotland on such a boat? By land or sea, it would have been a difficult undertaking. (Credit: Ancient Pages)

As to the question of why a stone from so far away was incorporated into Stonehenge, that is something we will probably never know for certain. Neither we will know for certain the reasons for the building of Göbekli Tepe. We can learn much from the ancient rocks left to us by our remote ancestors but their motives may remain hidden for the rest of time.

Archaeology News for December 2023: Studies of two Ancient Structures reveal much about prehistoric Humans as Builders.

Many creatures in the natural world build structures, Bees build their hives, many birds build nests and Beavers build their lodges. Human beings however have rebuilt the world with all of our structures. It’s not surprising therefore that much of the work of archaeologists concerns human structures, how and why they were built.

Bower Bird males build some of the most incredible nests and then they decorate the entrances with basically whatever they can find. All to attract a female for mating. (Credit: Alamy)

The first structure I’ll discuss today is a very well known one, perhaps the best known of all the prehistoric structures, Stonehenge in England. Much has already been written about this most famous of stone circles so I’ll just mention a few points of importance for today’s story.

We’ve learned a lot about Stonehenge over the last century but that hasn’t taken away the sense of mystery from these ancient ruins! (Credit: HistoryExtra)

Begun about the year 2200BCE Stonehenge was initially a circular trench dug into the soil with the excavated earth forming a circular henge inside the trench. It wasn’t until some 500 years later that the first stones were brought to the site and placed inside the earthen ring. These first stones are known as ‘Bluestones’, each weighing about 5 metric tonnes that were brought from the Mynydd Preseli region of western Wales, a full 290 kilometers from Stonehenge. See my post of 27 February 2019. How stone aged men managed to transport these large stones such a great distance is still a subject of controversy.

One of the techniques proposed by modern archaeologists for how the big Sarsen stones of Stonehenge were transported. (Credit: Bradshaw Foundation)
And once the ancient Britons got the stones to the site of Stonehenge they then had to erect them! (Credit: English Heritage)

The larger ‘Sarsen Stones’, some weighing as much as 55 metric Tonnes, were brought to the site around the year 1500 BCE. While these massive rocks came from a much closer location just some 25 kilometers to the north bringing them to the Stonehenge site must still have required the cooperation of hundreds if not thousands of people indicating a society with considerable organization. 

The Heel stone at Stonehenge lies a distance outside the main ring of the stone circle but from inside it aligns with the rising of the sun on the summer solstice, the first day of summer. (Credit: Daily Mail)
The rising of the Sun on the first day of summer as seen from the center of Stonehenge. You can understand why the ancient Britons built this wonderful place. (Credit: EarthSky)

Several of the individual stones at Stonehenge have been given special names such as the Heel stone, which sits away from the other stones near the entrance to the original, and the slaughter stone, so named because early archaeologists thought it could have been used for human sacrifice. Both of these stones are Sarsen stones.

The Altar stone at Stonehenge, so named because of its placement in the circle and its lying flat on the ground. But was it actually used as an altar, we can only guess? (Credit: The Stones of Stonehenge)

One of the Bluestones also has a special name, the Altar stone, so named because the other Bluestones seem to orient towards it as if it were the place where certain ceremonies were enacted. Now a new study by researchers at the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in the UK have questioned whether the Altar stone is in fact a Bluestone after all. For one thing, although the Altar stone is about the same size and shape as the Bluestones the others are primarily igneous rocks while the Altar stone is made of sandstone. Now there are sandstone deposits near the quarry in Whales were the Bluestones came from and it has long been thought that was the Altar stone’s source.

This outcropping of rocks in Wales has been chemically demonstrated to be the actual quarry where the Stonehenge Bluestones came from some 290 km from the site of Stonehenge. (Credit: The Sun)

The new study conducted several different analysis of the material of the Altar stone including Ramen Spectroscopy, XRF analysis, optical petrography and SEM-EDS analysis. What the researchers found was that the Altar stone had a significantly higher level of the element Barium than the stones from the Welsh quarry, so it definitely did not come from the same place as the other Bluestones.

The study of racks and minerals using different forms of light, optical petrography, can not only tell you a great deal about the rocks but can be very beautiful as well. (Credit: YouTube)

Where did the Altar stone come from, no one knows. So now the hunt is on to try to find the geographic source of the Altar stone. At the same time archaeologists now have to try to understand why that particular stone, from wherever it came from, was brought to Stonehenge. Now we have yet another mystery to add to all the mysteries surrounding Stonehenge.

A clan of Homo erectus, our ancestors half a million years ago. There is a great deal of evidence that H erectus used fire and hunted as shown in this artist’s drawing but the hut in the center? New evidence does indicate that H erectus may have built structures as well! (Credit: Fine Art in America)

The second structure in the news recently may not be as famous as Stonehenge but it is certainly much older, in fact at an estimated age of 475,000 years old it may be the earliest wooden structure known have to been built by humans. In fact the structure wasn’t built by our species Homo sapiens but probably by our ancestral species Homo erectus.

It just two pieces of wood lying together but those pieces have been worked with stone tools so as to fit together making them the oldest known wooden construction made by human beings. (Credit: The Guardian)

The wood was discovered in the sands at the bottom of the river beneath the Kalambo falls in Zambia not far from the border with Tanzania by archaeologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Aberystwyth. The location had been studied by archaeologists ever since the 1950s and pieces of wood that shows signs of having been worked by humans have been found there before. Those artifacts included sticks used for digging, the hafts of spears and wood used to build fires. The wooden pieces from the riverbed were preserved because they had been essentially ‘pickled’ by the acidic water of the river.

The Kalambo Falls in Kenya are not only very beautiful but the area around them are an archaeological treasure for the study of our ancient ancestors. (Credit: Tanzania Tourism)

The new find however consists of two much larger wooden logs, each about 2m long, which had been worked by stone tools in such a way as to fit together in a ‘T’ shape. The archaeologists who found the logs think that the wooden T probably served either as a foundation for either a dwelling of some kind or more likely an earthen platform from which to fish in the river.

Tom Sawyer knew that fishing was better off of a wooden platform. So apparently did Homo erectus. (Credit: Amazon.com)

Unlike earlier pieces of wood from beneath the falls the team was able to get a more precise date on the logs by using a new dating technique known as luminescence dating. This technique depends on the fact that grains of sand will pick up natural radioactivity from the environment over time. By heating up those grains and analyzing the light they emit their age can be determined. Luminescence dating is quickly becoming an important tool in archaeology and paleontology because it is able to measure the age of objects that are too old to be determined by Carbon14 but too young to use Potassium-Argon dating.

Luminescence dating can be used to determine how long grains of soil have been buried away from the light of the Sun. (Credit: Geographisches Institut)

The find in Zambia pushes back in time the date of the first known use of wood to build structures showing that even our remote ancestor were capable of innovation and invention.