For years, excavators believed a hill on Scotland’s Orkney island was simply a mass of moraine, or debris left behind by a glacier. However it’s really a huge Rock Age temple complex filled with artefacts.
The Ness of Brodgar, a strip of land in between 2 lochs (or lakes) on the island, was currently well-known for the Ring of Brodgar. This circle of standing stones, normally thought to have actually been developed in between 2500 and 2000 BC, is the third biggest stone ring in the British Isles. Orkney itself had actually long been an archaeological bonanza of Rock Age sites. Yet after a 2002 geophysical study of the location, archaeologists understood they had found something really incredible.
“We have actually discovered a Neolithic holy place facility that is without parallel in Western Europe,” excavation director Nick Card of the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology informed the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper in 2012. “As a matter of fact the area is entirely manmade, although it covers more than six acres of land.”
A collection of excavations revealed huge sections of the complex, which features greater than a lots holy places linked by rock pathways to sheds such as kitchens. Miners have actually discovered pottery, the bones of sacrificed animals, rock devices, artwork, and evidence that these Rock Age individuals repainted their walls with vivid pigments.
Although scientists do not understand the exact function of the facility, it “wasn’t a negotiation or a location for the living,” archaeologist Dr. Colin Richards told the Guardian. The main Brodgar dig’s web site describes that Richards believes a range of individuals from many communities across Orkney assisted construct the facility, which was a focal point for spiritual ceremonies that remain mysterious to us.
Since the facility is located between the Ring of Brodgar and also the Standing Stones of Stenness, it’s feasible that these sites were all connected together as a “ceremonial passage” that could have routed site visitors from throughout Orkney and also neighboring islands toward a vital ceremonial point.
