Europe's Oldest Civilization Found

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Europe's Oldest

Civilization Found

By David Keys

Archaeology Correspondent

The Independent - UK

6-12-5

 

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.

 

©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

 

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