The Goseck circle is a Neolithic

Neolithic

The Neolithic Age, Era, or Period, or New Stone Age, was a period in the development of human technology, beginning about 9500 BC in some parts of the Middle East, and later in other parts of the world. It is traditionally considered as the last part of the Stone Age...

 structure in Goseck

Goseck

Goseck is a municipality lying on the Saale River, in the Burgenlandkreis district of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.-Geographic location:Goseck is located on the north bank of the Saale River about halfway between Naumburg and Weißenfels....

 in the Burgenlandkreis

Burgenlandkreis

The Burgenlandkreis was a district in the south of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Neighboring districts are Merseburg-Querfurt, Weißenfels, Leipziger Land, Aschersleben-Staßfurt, Altenburger Land, Greiz, district-free Gera, Saale-Holzland, Weimarer Land, Sömmerda and the Kyffhäuserkreis.- History :The...

 district in Saxony-Anhalt

Saxony-Anhalt

Saxony-Anhalt is a landlocked state of Germany. Its capital is Magdeburg and it is surrounded by the German states of Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.Saxony-Anhalt covers an area of...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It consists of a set of concentric ditches 75 metres (246 feet) across and two palisade rings containing gates in defined places. It is considered the earliest sun observatory

Observatory

An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geology, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed...

 currently known in the world. Interpretations of the ring suggest that Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an Neolithic and Bronze Age

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons. Chronologically, it stands between the Stone Age and Iron Age...

 people measured the heavens far earlier and more accurately than historians have thought. The site was made public in August 2003. German media have called the site "German Stonehenge," although the use of the term henge

Henge

There are three related types of Neolithic earthwork which are all sometimes loosely called henges. The essential characteristic of all three types is that they feature a ring bank and ditch but with the ditch inside the bank rather than outside...

for structures outside Britain

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 and Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 is disputed and it apparently has no earth bank.

Context

The circle at Goseck is one of more than 250 ring-ditches in Germany, Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 and Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...

 identified by aerial surveys, though archaeologists have investigated barely 10% of them. Goloring

Goloring

The Goloring is an ancient earthworks monument located near Koblenz, Germany. It was created in the Bronze Age era, which dates back to the Urnfield culture . During this time a widespread solar cult is believed to have existed in Central Europe....

 near Koblenz

Koblenz

Koblenz is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine at its confluence with the Moselle, where the Deutsches Eck and its monument are situated.As Koblenz was one of the military posts established by Drusus about 8 BC, the...

 in western Germany is a similar, if later, example. Previously archaeologists thought that the enclosures might have been fortifications and were puzzled by the fact that there was no sign of buildings inside the circles.

Not all precisely laid out Neolithic and Bronze Age European religious, calendrical, or astronomical circles were stone circle

Stone circle

A stone circle is a monument of standing stones arranged in a circle. Such monuments have been constructed across the world throughout history for many different reasons....

s of megalith

Megalith

A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic describes structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.The word 'megalith' comes from the Ancient...

s or standing stone

Standing stone

Standing stones, orthostats, liths, or more commonly megaliths are solitary stones set vertically in the ground and come in many different varieties....

s; Stonehenge

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...

 and Mnajdra

Mnajdra

Mnajdra is a megalithic temple complex found on the southern coast of the Mediterranean island of Malta. Mnajdra is approximately 500 metres from the Ħaġar Qim megalithic complex...

 are atypical examples. Even the Stonehenge site was preceded by a ditch-and-bank enclosure with timbers added later; their posthole

Posthole

In archaeology a posthole is a cut feature used to hold a surface timber or stone. They are usually much deeper than they are wide although truncation may not make this apparent....

s remain. (Evidence of holes in the ground is very permanent. For example, when a posthole is left unused, it later fills with sediments, creating a characteristic pattern in an archaeological dig.) Mnajdra and the Maltese megalithic temple complexes are set in a woodless environment.

In a geographical context, the circle at Goseck is no further than 20 kilometres (12.4 mi) from the site where the Nebra sky disk was found. As the circle and the sky disk do not date from the same era, a link between them has been speculated about, but remains entirely unproven up to this point.

Description

Goseck ring is one of the best preserved and extensively investigated of the many similar structures built at around the same time. Its preservation and investigation have led to the belief that it was a solar observatory, although some archaeologists question this. In the first opening of the site, a state archaeologist Harald Meller called it a milestone in archaeological research.

Traces of the original configuration reveal that the Goseck ring consisted of four concentric circles, a mound

Mound

A mound is a general term for an artificial heaped pile of earth, gravel, sand, rocks, or debris. The most common use is in reference to natural earthen formation such as hills and mountains, particularly if they appear artificial. The term may also be applied to any rounded area of topographically...

, a ditch, and two wooden palisade

Palisade

A palisade is a steel or wooden fence or wall of variable height, usually used as a defensive structure.- Typical construction :Typical construction consisted of small or mid sized tree trunks aligned vertically, with no spacing in between. The trunks were sharpened or pointed at the top, and were...

s. The palisades had three sets of gates facing southeast, southwest, and north. At the winter solstice

Winter solstice

Winter solstice may refer to:* Winter solstice, astronomical event* Winter Solstice , former band* Winter Solstice: North , seasonal songs* Winter Solstice , 2005 American film...

, observers at the center would have seen the sun rise and set through the southeast and southwest gates. Potsherds at the site suggests that the observatory was built ca. 4900 BCE because they have linear designs compared to standard chronologies of pottery styles.

The cultural nexus that produced the circle is called the Stroke-Ornamented Pottery Culture. Archaeologists

Archaeology

Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...

 generally agree that Goseck circle was used for astronomical observation. Together with calendar calculations, it allowed coordinating an easily judged lunar calendar

Lunar calendar

A lunar calendar is a calendar that is based on cycles of the lunar phase. A common purely lunar calendar is the Islamic calendar or Hijri calendar. A feature of the Islamic calendar is that a year is always 12 months, so the months are not linked with the seasons and drift each solar year by 11 to...

 with the more demanding measurements of a solar calendar

Solar calendar

A solar calendar is a calendar whose dates indicate the position of the earth on its revolution around the sun .-Tropical solar calendars:...

, embodied in a spiritual religious context. However, archaeologists disagree about whether all circles were used for the same purpose.

Other observations

Excavators also found the remains of what may have been ritual fires, animal and human bones, and a headless skeleton near the southeastern gate, possibly a sign of consecration sacrifice

Sacrifice

Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts...

.

There is no sign of fire or of other destruction, so why the site was abandoned is unknown. Later villagers built a defensive moat

Moat

A moat is a deep, broad ditch, either dry or filled with water, that surrounds a castle, other building or town, historically to provide it with a preliminary line of defence. In some places moats evolved into more extensive water defences, including natural or artificial lakes, dams and sluices...

 following the ditches of the old enclosure.

Discovery

The first sign of the circle was a 1991 aerial survey

Aerial survey

Aerial survey is a geomatics method of collecting information by using aerial photography, LiDAR or from remote sensing imagery using other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as infrared, gamma, or ultraviolet. It can also refer to the chart or map made by analysing a region from the air...

 photograph that showed circular ridges under a wheat field. The crop mark

Crop mark

Crop mark may refer to*in printing, marks placed at the corners of a form to indicate where the page is to be trimmed*Cropmarks, in archaeology: differential growth indicating buried sites*Crop circles...

s were easy to see in a season of drought. Francois Bertemes and Peter Biehl of the University of Halle-Wittenberg began a major excavation of the site in 2002. When archaeologists combined the evidence with GPS observations, they noticed that the two southern openings marked the sunrise and sunset of the winter solstice

Solstice

A solstice is an astronomical event that happens twice each year when the Sun's apparent position in the sky, as viewed from Earth, reaches its northernmost or southernmost extremes...

 and summer solstice

Summer solstice

The summer solstice occurs exactly when the axial tilt of a planet's semi-axis in a given hemisphere is most inclined towards the star that it orbits. Earth's maximum axial tilt to our star, the Sun, during a solstice is 23° 26'. Though the summer solstice is an instant in time, the term is also...

.

Current status

Bertemes and Biehl have continued the excavation for a few weeks each year. In 2004 a group from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, joined the ongoing dig, giving it an international scope.

Archaeologists and state officials have reconstructed the wooden palisade of the circle. Woodworkers worked with hand tools so that the wooden posts would look more authentic. The site was opened to public on 21 December 2005, the winter solstice

Winter solstice

Winter solstice may refer to:* Winter solstice, astronomical event* Winter Solstice , former band* Winter Solstice: North , seasonal songs* Winter Solstice , 2005 American film...

.

External links

• Scientific American December 2003:"Circles for space: German 'Stonehenge' marks oldest observatory."
• Ulrich Boser - Solar Circle (Archaeology Magazine Vol Number 4 July/August 2006)
• Essay in English from the Deutsche Welle