Found: Europe's oldest civilisation

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http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=645976

 

Found: Europe's oldest civilisation

By David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent

11 June 2005

 

 

Archaeologists have discovered Europe's oldest civilisation, a network of

dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

 

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and

cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000

years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The

Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an

appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later

than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

 

In all, more than 150 temples have been identified. Constructed of earth and

wood, they had ramparts and palisades that stretched for up to half a mile.

They were built by a religious people who lived in communal longhouses up to

50 metres long, grouped around substantial villages. Evidence suggests their

economy was based on cattle, sheep, goat and pig farming.

 

Their civilisation seems to have died out after about 200 years and the

recent archaeological discoveries are so new that the temple building

culture does not even have a name yet.

 

Excavations have been taking place over the past few years - and have

triggered a re-evaluation of similar, though hitherto mostly undated,

complexes identified from aerial photographs throughout central Europe.

 

Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these very

early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were

constructed across a 400-mile swath of land in what is now Austria, the

Czech Republic, Slovakia, and eastern Germany.

 

The most complex excavated so far - located inside the city of Dresden -

consisted of an apparently sacred internal space surrounded by two

palisades, three earthen banks and four ditches.

 

The monuments seem to be a phenomenon associated exclusively with a period

of consolidation and growth that followed the initial establishment of

farming cultures in the centre of the continent.

 

It is possible that the newly revealed early Neolithic monument phenomenon

was the consequence of an increase in the size of - and competition between

- emerging Neolithic tribal or pan-tribal groups, arguably Europe's earliest

mini-states.

 

After a relatively brief period - perhaps just one or two hundred years -

either the need or the socio-political ability to build them disappeared,

and monuments of this scale were not built again until the Middle Bronze

Age, 3,000 years later. Why this monumental culture collapsed is a mystery.

 

The archaeological investigation into these vast Stone Age temples over the

past three years has also revealed several other mysteries. First, each

complex was only used for a few generations - perhaps 100 years maximum.

Second, the central sacred area was nearly always the same size, about a

third of a hectare. Third, each circular enclosure ditch - irrespective of

diameter - involved the removal of the same volume of earth. In other words,

the builders reduced the depth and/or width of each ditch in inverse

proportion to its diameter, so as to always keep volume (and thus time

spent) constant .

 

Archaeologists are speculating that this may have been in order to allow

each earthwork to be dug by a set number of special status workers in a set

number of days - perhaps to satisfy the ritual requirements of some sort of

religious calendar.

 

The multiple bank, ditch and palisade systems "protecting" the inner space

seem not to have been built for defensive purposes - and were instead

probably designed to prevent ordinary tribespeople from seeing the sacred

and presumably secret rituals which were performed in the "inner sanctum" .

 

The investigation so far suggests that each religious complex was ritually

decommissioned at the end of its life, with the ditches, each of which had

been dug successively, being deliberately filled in.

 

"Our excavations have revealed the degree of monumental vision and

sophistication used by these early farming communities to create Europe's

first truly large scale earthwork complexes," said the senior archaeologist,

Harald Staeuble of the Saxony state government's heritage department, who

has been directing the archaeological investigations. Scientific

investigations into the recently excavated material are taking place in

Dresden.

 

The people who built the huge circular temples were the descendants of

migrants who arrived many centuries earlier from the Danube plain in what is

now northern Serbia and Hungary. The temple-builders were pastoralists,

controlling large herds of cattle, sheep and goats as well as pigs. They

made tools of stone, bone and wood, and small ceramic statues of humans and

animals. They manufactured substantial amounts of geometrically decorated

pottery, and they lived in large longhouses in substantial villages.

 

One village complex and temple at Aythra, near Leipzig, covers an area of 25

hectares. Two hundred longhouses have been found there. The population would

have been up to 300 people living in a highly organised settlement of 15 to

20 very large communal buildings.