{"it":{"id":"EUR-007","kind":"site","sub":"Europe and the Mediterranean","name":"Goseck Circle","place":"Germany","lat":51.198,"lon":11.865,"date":"It was constructed around 4900 BC, and appears to have remained in use until around…","nfacts":6,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"The Goseck Circle in Germany was laid out around 4900 BCE as rings of ditches and palisades, and its gates line up with sunrise and sunset at the winter solstice.","why":"That alignment is why it is promoted as a 'solar observatory'. Officially it is presented as a ritual site, and the two ideas may not conflict.","src":[318,638],"nsrc":3,"yt":"Can a calendar also be a temple?","rel":["NEW-NEW","STO-HEN"],"hook":"Two gates in a 4900 BCE circle frame the winter solstice sun. The ditch also held human bones."},"S":{"318":["Wikipedia: Goseck Circle","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goseck_Circle"],"638":["State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (idw release): New research on the Goseck circular enclosure","https://idw-online.de/en/news818930"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-007","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"The circle consists of a concentric ditch","a":"diameter","v":"75","u":"metres","o":"The circle consists of a concentric ditch 75metres (246feet) across and two palisade rings containing entrances in places aligned with sunrise and sunset on the winter solstice days and smaller entrances aligned with the summer solstice.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1390"},{"f":"The circle consists of a concentric ditch 75metres","a":"diameter","v":"246","u":"feet","o":"The circle consists of a concentric ditch 75metres (246feet) across and two palisade rings containing entrances in places aligned with sunrise and sunset on the winter solstice days and smaller entrances aligned with the summer solstice.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1391"},{"f":"site chronology","a":"dating (as stated)","v":"ocarbon dating places the construction of the site close to 4900 BC, while the style of the pottery shards associate it w","u":"","o":"Radiocarbon dating places the construction of the site close to 4900 BC, while the style of the pottery shards associate it with the stroke-ornamented ware culture of ca. 4700 BC, suggesting that the site remained in use throughout two or three centuries.","unc":"","by":"per cited source","yr":"","m":"documentary: auto-extracted sentence","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary)","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M1392"},{"f":"1 675 oak poles with a height of","a":"height","v":"2.5","u":"meters","o":"Archaeologists and state officials have rebuilt the wooden palisade of the circle using 1,675 oak poles with a height of 2.5 meters.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1393"},{"f":"by a circular v-shaped moat of up to","a":"depth","v":"1.8","u":"meters","o":"The site is surrounded by a circular v-shaped moat of up to 1.8 meters in depth.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1394"},{"f":"The diameter of the moat is","a":"diameter","v":"75","u":"meters","o":"The diameter of the moat is 75 meters, measured from its external border.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1370994042 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M1395"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"It was constructed around 4900 BC, and appears to have remained in use until around 4700 BC.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"51.19833333","lon":"11.86472222","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/5057844"},"src":[{"id":"S0300","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Goseck_Circle&oldid=1370994042"},{"id":"S0486","t":"Wikipedia: Goseck Circle","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goseck_Circle"},{"id":"S2639","t":"State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (idw release): New research on the Goseck circular enclosure","u":"https://idw-online.de/en/news818930"},{"id":"VEUR-007-4","t":"Features: eMuseum Himmelswege","u":"https://www.emuseum-himmelswege.de/en/dig-deeper/the-goseck-site/features"},{"id":"VEUR-007-5","t":"idw: Opferstätte und astronomisches Observatorium, neue Erkenntnisse zu Goseck (2023)","u":"https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2023/08/08/opferstaette-und-astronomisches-observatorium-neue-erkenntnisse-zur-mittelneolithischen-kreisgrabenanlage-von-goseck"}],"sum":"In 1991, in a season of drought, an aerial survey photograph taken by Otto Braasch over a wheat field near the village of Goseck in eastern Germany showed something drawn in the crop. Circular ridges showed through the wheat, ring inside ring. The drought made them easy to see. It also told a darker story: the shapes were visible because the ground over them had been worn away, and whatever lay beneath was eroding into the plough soil. The rings were about 6,900 years old. What they framed, it turned out, was the sun.\n\nThe Goseck Circle lies on farmland in Saxony-Anhalt, between the towns of Naumburg and Weissenfels, on ground that rises gently toward the south not far from where the Unstrut river flows into the Saale. It was built by farmers of the Stroke-Ornamented Pottery culture, named for the way they decorated their pots. Radiocarbon dating places its construction close to 4900 BC, and the state heritage office dates its use from about 4900 to 4600 or 4550 BC.\n\nWhat the farmers built was a ring of earth and timber. An outer ditch, V-shaped, about 2 metres wide and up to 1.8 metres deep, enclosed a circle some 75 metres across. It was dug in segments that were later joined, which is why the depth of its floor varies. Inside it stood two rings of close-set timber posts, forming a nearly solid wall. Spoil from the ditch may have been heaped into a bank beyond it, probably in segments rather than one continuous ridge. Three main entrances cut through ditch and fences, in the north, the south-east and the south-west, each narrowing as one passed inward, from the gap in the ditch to the outer palisade to the inner. No traces of buildings were found inside. The circle was not a village. It was a space set apart.\n\nGoseck belongs to a family of about 140 to 150 circular enclosures known from the Middle Neolithic of central and eastern Europe, ranging from 40 to 250 metres across. At 75 metres, Goseck is one of the smaller ones. What makes it matter is that it is one of the few that has been completely excavated and published. Between 2002 and 2004 the state heritage office and the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, under François Bertemes and Peter Biehl, dug the whole site, and in 2004 a team from the University of California, Berkeley joined them. When the excavators combined their plans with GPS measurements, they noticed what the southern gates were aimed at.\n\nStand at a point near the middle of the enclosure on the morning of 21 December, the winter solstice, and the first rays of the sun fall through the south-eastern gate. That evening, the last rays of the setting sun fall through the south-western gate. These are the shortest day's sunrise and sunset, the turning point of the year, when the light stops shrinking and begins to return. Only at these two gates do the openings in the fences run on through gaps in the ditch, as if the builders wanted those two lines kept clear through every barrier. Narrower gaps in the fences point toward the summer solstice and toward Beltane, an old festival at the start of May; the heritage office's sources give both 30 April and 1 May. The north gate has no clear astronomical meaning and does not point exactly north. The best viewing point is not the geometric centre but a spot slightly north-west of it, and from there, the heritage office says, the sunrises and sunsets of key dates \"could be predicted and observed to within a few days.\" Around 4800 BC the Hyades, a star cluster in the constellation of the Bull, would also have shown in the south-east gate.\n\nSo far the story is one of farmers keeping time, which matters to people who live by the seasons. But the ditch held other things. It contained fragments of cattle skulls and about 30 cattle horn cores, in unusually high numbers. Cattle are by far the most common animal among the bones from the site. In the fill of the north gate lay bones of the aurochs, the great wild ox, alongside pottery of unusual quality and decoration. One pit held five finger and hand bones from the right hand of a young or adult man, laid down still joined together. Where the outer palisade cuts across another pit, about 1.6 by 1.3 metres, the walls were heavily reddened by fire, lit again and again over a long period. Inside lay the bones of one adult, only the arms and legs. The trunk and the skull were missing, and the bones were no longer joined, which suggests they were placed there after the body had partly decayed. Finds like these have been read as signs of a burial ritual, or even of human sacrifice.\n\nThe excavators' 2023 publication, led by Norma Henkel, does not choose between sky and ritual. The heritage office's release is titled \"Sacred place and astronomical observatory,\" and it reads the cattle skulls, burned pits and human remains as marks of a sacred function, with the solar alignments pointing to sacred use as well. Other uses have been proposed for enclosures of this kind: meeting places, cattle pens, defences, observatories and ritual spaces. Defence seems unlikely here. A bank outside a ditch makes a poor wall, since attackers could simply run down into the ditch, and the heritage office floats the idea that it was meant \"more symbolically to prevent anything from escaping from the enclosure.\"\n\nThe sceptics have a point of their own. Marketing has called Goseck one of the oldest solar observatories in the world, and some have suggested the name was chosen mainly for that purpose, since the solstices are the only clear alignments built into the remains. Any circle with several gates will catch some solar event by chance, because the sun rises and sets across a wide arc over a year. At Goseck, though, only the two winter-solstice openings run through the ditch as well as both fences, which makes chance harder to argue. The archaeologist Ralf Schwarz has gone further, suggesting the layout let its users coordinate an easily judged lunar calendar with the harder measurements of a solar one.\n\nThink about who benefited. In a farming community, the person who can say with authority that the sun has turned, that the year has begun again, holds a kind of power that no spear can match. Fencing the observation point behind two walls of timber, so that only those inside could see the light come through the gate, could turn knowledge into privilege. That is a reading, not a finding, but it fits a circle built to be closed.\n\nAfter two or three centuries the enclosure was left open, and around 4650 to 4550 BC it was finally filled in. There is no sign of fire or destruction. Why it was abandoned is unknown. In 2005 it was rebuilt on its old footprint with more than 1,600 oak posts, 2.5 metres tall, shaped with hand tools, and opened to the public on 21 December, the winter solstice. The state archaeologist Harald Meller called it \"a milestone in archaeological research.\" If people six thousand nine hundred years ago could fix the turning of the year to within a few days with posts, ditches and patience, and if they surrounded that knowledge with bones, fire and walls, what exactly did they believe was coming through the gate with the light?","qs":["Can a calendar also be a temple?","Two gates match the winter solstice. How many lucky lines would a circle with three gates produce by chance?","Goseck was rebuilt on its old footprint. Does a reconstruction help us understand a site, or replace it?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg/1280px-2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg","title":"2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Kreuzschnabel","cap":"Detail of Goseck Circle (prehistoric solar observatory)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/50/GoseckSonnenobservatorium.JPG/1280px-GoseckSonnenobservatorium.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GoseckSonnenobservatorium.JPG","title":"GoseckSonnenobservatorium.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Jwaller","cap":"Reconstruction of the neolithic sun observatory in Goseck (district: Burgenlandkreis, Saxony-Anhalt)"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Goseck_Circle_1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goseck_Circle_1.jpg","title":"Goseck Circle 1.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen","cap":"Goseck Circle, Germany, 4900 BC"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/35/Goseck_Sonnenobservatorium_26.jpg/1280px-Goseck_Sonnenobservatorium_26.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goseck_Sonnenobservatorium_26.jpg","title":"Goseck Sonnenobservatorium 26.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Einsamer Schütze","cap":"Circular ditch of Goseck"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Goseck_circle_-_50251188141.jpg/1280px-Goseck_circle_-_50251188141.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goseck_circle_-_50251188141.jpg","title":"Goseck circle - 50251188141.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Marcus O. Bst","cap":"Goseck Circle: The Oldest Known Solar Observatory"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"75","u":"m","h":"Gates align with sunrise and sunset at the winter solstice","s":[71]},{"v":"4900 BC","h":"It was constructed around 4900 BC, and appears to have remained in use until around 4700 BC","s":[71]}],"hs":{"71":["Wikipedia: Goseck Circle (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goseck_Circle"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-007.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg/1280px-2013-Sonnenobservatorium-Goseck.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}