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Giorgio: las fotos que dices no son europeas sino de zigurats mesopotámicos
Aquí os pego el artículo de The independent referido:
Found: Europe's oldest civilisation
How 7,000-year-old temples reveal the elAborate culture of Europe
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.
15 June 2005 16:25
http://news.independent.co.uk
/europe/story.jsp?story=645976
Para leer este otro hay que pagar, si alguno esta suscrito que lo pegue please
http://news.independent.co.uk
/europe/story.jsp?story=645972
Aga: El otro artículo de The Independent del día 11. Cuando los vi y recomendé (13/06/2005 0:07:28) eran abiertos; pero casi siempre, menos con El País y algunos otros, se pueden leer luego también en la versión caché de Google; aunque éstos, por su importancia, andan ya circulando en varios websites.
How 7,000-year-old temples reveal the elAborate culture of Europe
The construction of the temples of Nickern, on the site that is now Dresden, puts the first civilisations of Europe at the forefront of early human endeavour to master nature.
Some two millennia before the first stones were laid for the pyramids of Egypt, humanity's preoccupation, from the forests of Germany to the plains of Pakistan, was - both literally and figuratively - to place roots in the soil.
Archaeological evidence suggests that by the fifth millennium BC, tribes in regions such as Baluchistan, on the site known as Mehrgarh, in the north-western corner of the Indian sub-continent, and the Samarrans in Mesopotamia were establishing farms and permanent communities.
In Egypt, crops such as flax, cotton and barley were being grown from About 5000BC in villages where herds of sheep and goats were also kept. The discovery of early traces of agriculture in New Guinea from About the same time indicate that across the globe humans were starting to sculpt their landscape.
Dr John Robertson, a Washington University-based anthropologist, said: "There is much of this period that we still don't understand, but humanity was beyond the stage of hunting down prey and smearing itself with the entrails.
"Across the world, man was beginning to see his surroundings as something that could be organised or curtailed - to be farmed. That is a profound change and it did not displace an innate sense of reverence for nature.
"The first civilisations therefore dedicated effort, more often than not huge, into reflecting that in monumental structures."
It is this impetus for a sacred space, such as the early temples dating from this time in Mesopotamia, that appears to be behind the vast structures uncovered in central Europe.
Archaeologists have struggled to pinpoint and outline the development of the first farming communities, because the evidence that they left behind is scanty at best. But the picture that is often drawn of the European context is that an increasingly sophisticated farming culture, with its base in Mesopotamia, roughly the area occupied by present-day Iraq and Syria, was radiating outwards across the Middle East towards the outer reaches of Europe.
On the Orkney islands, complex stone structures such as the Knap of Howar, the earliest standing dwellings to be found in north-west Europe, date from About 3500BC.
Stone, however, is durable and tends to stay in place. By contrast, it has been difficult for archaeologists to establish the degree of sophistication of the civilisation that built the Nickern temples - more than a millennium before the Orkney structures - using timber and earth.
Andrew Sherratt, professor of archaeology at the University of Oxford, said: "The problem has been that all that is often left of these structures are post-holes. It is only when we begin to reconstruct them that we understand the elAborate nature of the culture.
"What appears to have been discovered in Germany is something which might have astonished, for example, Britons, who were only just beginning to farm in this period. But to the Mesopotamians, it would have been the grounds for a rather patronising pat on the back."
While the precise nature of the Nickern round buildings remains a mystery, evidence suggests their owners were sophisticated.
In the early Egyptian village of al-Fayyum, dead domesticated animals were wrapped in linen and buried close to their community. Later evidence from Ancient Egypt offers in insight into the complexity of beliefs that accompanied this practice.
In Nickern, the people who were building their own grand places of worship manufactured ceramic statues of humans and animals - as did the inhabitants of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan - although there is as yet little evidence of the beliefs that drove this practice.
Fuente: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=645972
La verdad es que acAbo de llegar de Budapest y con lo ancho que es el Danubio, no me extrañaría que se comiera media Europa ;).
En cualquier caso, este hallazgo es fantástico y lo de Stonengenecemex me lo temía (como lo del bicho del lago Ness).
Salud.
Bueno yo creo que la forma es casual. Al fin y al cAbo el circulo es la forma que mejor abarca una zona de terreno para poder defenderse, tanto desde dentro como desde fuera.
Bueno yo creo que la forma es casual. Al fin y al cAbo el circulo es la forma que mejor abarca una zona de terreno para poder defenderse, tanto desde dentro como desde fuera.
Bueno yo creo que la forma es casual. Al fin y al cAbo el circulo es la forma que mejor abarca una zona de terreno para poder defenderse, tanto desde dentro como desde fuera.
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