Archaeologists have solved another mystery from thousands of years ago.
Rune Iversen, associate professor of archaeology at the University of Copenhagen, digs in to tell us more.
Rune Iversen is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on the European Neolithic, including migrations, cultural interactions, art, and iconography. He is deeply engaged in cross-disciplinary research where the migration aspect of the Neolithization of Europe and the later Neolithic is a central aspect of his collaboration with geneticists and linguists. He is also principal editor of the international Open Access Danish Journal of Archaeology.
When the Sun Darkened 5000 Years Ago
The Neolithic site of Vasagård on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea has revealed over 600 small, engraved stone plaques dated to around 2900 BC.
The plaques are referred to as ‘sun stones’ due to the rayed images that characterize many of them.
Figurative images are rare at this time so we were puzzled as to why we would find large numbers of sun images dating to this specific period. This made us think that they might be related to a natural disaster of some kind that could have caused the Neolithic population to sacrifice large numbers of sun images.
Fossil tree rings from northern Europe and USA indicate spring and summer frost events around 2900 BC and ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica show that a major volcanic eruption took place at that time.
Volcanic eruptions inject sulphate into the stratosphere creating a haze, which reflects solar radiation back into space and causes global cooling. This would likely have affected weather and harvest across the northern hemisphere for several years causing crop failure and famine.
We link the massive deposition of sun images at Vasagård to this cold climate event. What we see in the archaeological layers is probably the result of a joint effort to deal with the darkened sun and to restore the harvest.
Read More:
[Cambridge University Press] – Sun stones and the darkened sun: Neolithic miniature art from the island of Bornholm, Denmark
