Ancient, carved stones can be buried to call the sun

While a volcanic eruption darkened the sun approximately 4,900 years ago, a stone culture sacrificed hundreds of stone tiles decorated to try to shake it again.

A carved stone trove discovered by ritual collection sites in Bornholm, an island in Denmark, exhibit motifs that most commonly represent the sun and plants similar to the crops. Moreover, an analysis of the ice cores points to a volcanic eruption about the time when the stones were deliberately buried. Received together, evidence suggests that the burial of stones may have been related to the potentially cataclysmic event, archaeologist Rune Iversen and colleagues report January 15 Antiquity.

“The predominance of the motifs of the sun and plants is striking,” says Alison Sheridan, an archaeologist at the Scotland National Museum in Edinburgh who was not involved in the research. “These stones are seen as a kind of prayer or call for the sun to return, and that crops grow again.”

The Iversen team revealed the collection of over 600 stones decorated between 2013 and 2018, in the ritual collection sites thought to have been built from the pipe culture. These people seem to have carved and replenished some gap over a century. About 2900 BC, they scattered sun stones across the ground like the seeds in one field, sealing the canals and built some circular wooden structures on the top.

“It is a bit special that all of these stones suddenly have, and you do not see them from money or later,” says Iversen, from the University of Copenhagen. This led the Iversen team to conclude that the burial was in response to a big incident.

After excluding solar eclipses, researchers addressed the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, which show traces of a volcanic eruption around 2910 BC, which would probably cause global colds and influenced the harvest. Lake sediments from Germany also suggest that the sunlight is drastically reduced around this time, while tree rings from Germany and the United States suggest some frost incidents during growth seasons.

“The Assembly is really extraordinary in terms of quality and quantity,” says archaeologist Marc Vander is born of Bournemouth University in England. But he is careful about a causal link between burial and volcanic activity. “One advantage would be to see a much larger chronological window to see if this period represents a specific environmental signature such as a higher premature incidence.”

It is unclear which volcano exploded, though finding its location may shed light on its wider influence, says Iversen. The deposit time coincides with the reduction of the culture of pipes and widespread social turmoil throughout Europe.

“Given that the effects of volcanic activity will have been felt in much of the northern hemisphere,” says Sheridan, “this causes someone to ask what other reactions they may have had elsewhere.”