Ancient Scandinavians dragged 59 boulders to a seaside cliff near
what is now the Swedish fishing village of Kaseberga. They carefully
arranged the massive stones — each weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800
kilograms) — in the outline of a 220-foot-long (67-meter) ship
overlooking the Baltic Sea.
Archaeologists generally agree this megalithic structure, known as
Ales Stenar ("Ale's Stones"), was assembled about 1,000 years ago, near
the end of the Iron Age, as a burial monument. But a team of researchers
now argues it's really 2,500 years old, dating from the Scandinavian
Bronze Age, and was built as
an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as England's Stonehenge.
"We can now say
Stonehenge
has a younger sister, but she's so much more beautiful," said Nils-Axel
Morner, a retired geologist from Stockholm University who co-authored
the paper on the interpretation, published in March in the International
Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Other researchers familiar with the site are skeptical. Among other
arguments, they cite the results of carbon dating to reject Mörner's
interpretation.
Mörner says his team observed that the sun rises and sets at specific
points around Ales Stenar at the summer and winter solstices, hinting
that an ancient culture could have built it as an astronomical calendar
to time things like annual religious ceremonies or planting and
harvesting crops. [
Stunning Photos of Summer Solstice]
They also observed that certain aspects of the stone ship's geometry
matched those of Stonehenge, a Bronze Age monument that some enthusiasts
believe was used as a calendar. (Those claims are contentious, and
there are many other theories of
Stonehenge's original purpose.)
The similarities led Mörner to propose the
mysterious stone structure
of Sweden was a Stonehenge-inspired astronomical calendar constructed
by a Bronze Age Scandinavian community that regularly traveled and
traded throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.
"The first thing is to see that, yes, it's a calendar," Mörner told
LiveScience. "But Ale's Stones also tells us a lot more than we knew
before about trading and travel in the Bronze Age among Scandinavia,
England and Greece."
Courtesy:Fox N
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