Scientists Think Ancient ‘Sun Stones’ May Have Been Volcanic Sacrifices
Scientists from the University of Copenhagen—drawing on research of 60,000 years of volcanic activity derived from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica—have re-contextualized an ancient object known as a “sun stone.”
Located on the southern end of the Danish island of Bornholm, these stones are flat pieces of shale featuring intricately drawn Sun motifs.
Scholars now speculate that these stones might have been “sacrificed” due to a volcanic eruption around 2,900 B.C. that darkened the sky, likely causing crop failure and famine.
Short of a massive asteroid impacting the planet (RIP non-avian dino friends), few things have impacted Earth’s climate as dramatically as volcanoes. For instance, some 252 million years ago, the world’s largest mass extinction—the Great Dying—occurred due to intense volcanism in the Siberian Traps, and as early as the 1990s, an eruption from Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines caused global temperatures to cool for years.
Now, in a new study, scientists from the University of Copenhagen are reexamining the context of 5,000-year-old “sun stones”—flat shale pieces with intricately drawn Sun motifs—due to new climate science revealing a large neolithic volcanic eruption that occurred sometime around 2,900 B.C. The results of this study were published in the journal Antiquity.
These stones are pretty exclusive, as they only pop up in two known locations: Rispebjerg and Vasagård, on the southern end of the Danish island of Bornholm in the Nordic Sea.
“They symbolized fertility and were probably sacrificed to ensure sun and growth,” Rune Iversen, a co-author of the study from the University of Copenhagen, said in a press statement. “Sun stones were found in large quantities at the Vasagård West site, where residents deposited them in ditches forming part of a causewayed enclosure together with the remains of ritual feasts in the form of animal bones, broken clay vessels, and flint objects around 2,900 B.C. The ditches were subsequently closed.”
In 2022, a study carried out by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen analyzed ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and estimated the quantity and intensity of eruptions over the past 60,000 years. Some 69 of these eruptions were larger than the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 in Indonesia—the largest recorded eruption in human history.
This data showed that some kind of eruption took place around 2,900 B.C., which the authors suggest would have had devastating consequences for neolithic people living on the island. Increased levels of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere would’ve caused immense crop failure, potentially leading to the “sacrifice” of these sun stones. This could explain why archeologists uncovered a large cache of the stones at one location.
“If the Sun almost disappeared due to mist in the stratosphere for longer periods of time, it would have been extremely frightening for them,” Iversen said in a press statement. “It is reasonable to believe that the Neolithic people on Bornholm wanted to protect themselves from further deterioration of the climate by sacrificing sun stones—or perhaps they wanted to show their gratitude that the Sun had returned again.”
Archaeologists note that around the year 2,900 B.C., a “darkened Sun” would’ve been only one of the worries of these ancient people—DNA suggests that plague was also running rampant through the region. Scholars can’t be sure of the exact context of how these unique sun stones arrived on the southern edge of this one island, but like many devastating moments in Earth history, volcanoes may be be partly to blame.
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