An illustration reveals what the researchers imagine is the 4,000-year-old Stonehenge-like sanctuary that archaeologists have discovered in Tiel, a city in the centre of the Netherlands, in this handout image obtained on June 21, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old sanctuary made up of ditches and burial mounds in the central Netherlands that they imagine could have served an identical objective to Stonehenge.
Like the well-known stone circle in southern England, the sanctuary – which was as huge as at the very least three soccer fields and constructed with soil and wooden – was constructed to align with the solar on the solstices.
The archaeologists additionally discovered choices, together with animal skeletons, human skulls and helpful gadgets resembling a bronze spearhead, on the spots the place the solar shone by the openings, in response to a press release from the municipality of Tiel, a city round 70 km (45 miles) east of Rotterdam the place the positioning was excavated.
“The largest mound served as a sun calendar, similar to the famous stones of Stonehenge in England,” mentioned the assertion.
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“This sanctuary must have been a highly significant place where people kept track of special days in the year, performed rituals and buried their dead. Rows of poles stood along pathways used for processions.”
While excavating the positioning in 2017, archaeologists additionally discovered a number of graves. One grave was of a girl buried with a glass bead from Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq.
It’s the oldest bead ever discovered in the Netherlands and researchers mentioned it proved individuals of this space have been in contact with individuals virtually 5,000 km away.
The archaeologists took six years to analysis greater than 1,000,000 excavated objects courting from the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages.
After the excavation was completed, the positioning was lined once more to permit development work.
Some of the discoveries can be showcased in an area museum in Tiel and in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities.
