2024-05-04 01:31:41
Archaeologists discovered the finds in the town of Baltinglas, in County Wicklow in eastern Ireland, using lidar (ground-penetrating radar), a device that sends laser pulses to the ground from an airplane in flight. These pulses hit objects and are reflected back, helping researchers to map the topography of the landscape.
The area studied by the scientists was inhabited during the Early Neolithic (from about 3700 BC) and the Middle and Late Bronze Age (1400-800 BC) periods. But evidence of human life here during the 2,000 years between these two periods, known as the Middle Neolithic, has been scant – until now, it is said in a study published in the journal Antiquity.
Despite years of farming that has damaged some archaeological sites, lidar revealed three-dimensional landscape patterns with structures, including several rare structures—long, narrow, large-scale earthen structures that may have had a ritual purpose. According to scientists, this group is considered the largest deposit of such monuments in Ireland and Great Britain.
“I started researching this area about 10 years ago when I was doing my PhD, and I initially thought that this site in Ireland had the largest Bronze Age barrows in the country,” says study author James O’Driscoll, an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. – After various researches, we gradually began to understand that it is not only the Bronze Age, but also many Neolithic monuments. Around 2014 a local resident identified one of these monuments – but that was all we knew until the lidar survey.”
The new lidar survey revealed four more such structures, “which is why this is such an important discovery, and one we didn’t expect, because groups of archaeological sites like this simply don’t exist in Ireland,” says Mr O’Driscoll. “There are maybe half a dozen such archaeological monuments in Britain, and only about 20 such monuments are known in Ireland, but they occur in isolation.”
According to the study, most of the five structures are between 150 and 200 meters long, with the largest being around 400 meters long. Considering that people were building these monuments before the invention of bulldozers and backhoes, this is impressive to say the least.
“Because they [buvo pastatyti] during the Neolithic period, there were no metal tools and people probably used wooden shovels, the archaeologist says. “It shows how much resources, time and effort it took to build them, because it’s a sizeable settlement.”
Archaeologists believe such archaeological sites may have served several purposes, including links to “major solar events,” agriculture and “paths of the dead,” according to the report.
For example, four of these monuments face the “sunrise of the summer solstice,” which marks the height of the growing season.
These huge archaeological monuments were probably also intended for the dead, Mr O’Driscoll believes. “Although we don’t know what kind of rituals took place there, their arrangement suggests that they may have been used as routes for mourning processions or as a way to escort the dead to heaven,” he says.
According to the scientist, the monuments help us understand the lifestyle of these Neolithic people who were the first generation of farmers. “We now have a better understanding of the importance of agriculture to these communities, which quickly became central to their lives,” says Mr O’Driscoll.
Next, the researchers plan to study soil samples from the area to better understand what animals and plants were cultivated here during the early Neolithic period, according to Live Science.
2024-05-04 01:31:41