{"it":{"id":"EUR-ALE","kind":"site","sub":"Europe","name":"Ale's Stones (Ales stenar)","place":"Sweden","lat":55.383,"lon":14.054,"date":"c.600 CE by 14C majority (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"sandstone/granite boulders","nfacts":5,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"Ale's Stones, in southern Sweden, is a ship-shaped setting 67 m long, made of 59 boulders weighing up to about 5 tonnes each (single source). Most radiocarbon dates point to around AD 600.","why":"A Swedish stone ship whose date and purpose are still debated.","src":[433],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Can it be both?","rel":["STO-HEN"],"hook":"One radiocarbon date at Ale's Stones says 5,500 years. Six say about 1,400."},"S":{"433":["Wikipedia: Ale's Stones","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale's_Stones"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-ALE","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"ship setting","a":"length","v":"67","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3442"},{"f":"boulders","a":"count","v":"59","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3443"},{"f":"boulders","a":"max mass","v":"~5","u":"t","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3444"},{"f":"14C","a":"results","v":"7 (1 ~5,500 BP; 6 ~1,400 BP)","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084","b":"S","bb":"","t":"LAB_RESULT","n":"","id":"M3445"},{"f":"monument","a":"age","v":"~1,400 BP (late Nordic Iron Age)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3446"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"key_structure_dims","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA071","a":"ancient astronomical ship","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"Iron Age ship setting","ms":"","st":"supported-explained","n":"6 of 7 14C ~1400 BP","nl":4}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"c.600 CE by 14C majority (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"55.38265","lon":"14.05441","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q686510 (enwiki no coords))","agree":"no OSM match","b":"S","note":"Q686510 (enwiki no coords); https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/26095864 (55.38265,14.05441) | W18 retry: WD P625 55.3827,14.0544 (delta <0.0001 vs OSM) unreferenced -> independence unknown; stays SINGLE_SOURCE. Wikidata P625 counted as independent only if not copied from Wikipedia (P143 \"imported from Wikimedia project\" or unreferenced = not independent)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/26095864 (55.38265,14.05441)"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Ale's Stones","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ale%27s_Stones&oldid=1373919084"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Ale's Stones","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale's_Stones"},{"id":"VEUR-ALE-3","t":"Söderberg and Knarrström, New light on Ale's Stones (Lund Archaeological Review, PDF)","u":"https://journals.lub.lu.se/lar/article/download/21629/19472/52712"},{"id":"VEUR-ALE-4","t":"Söderberg, Knarrström and Stark 2012, Ales stenar: fördjupat kunskapsunderlag (Riksantikvarieämbetet UV rapport 2012:21, PDF)","u":"https://pub.raa.se/dokumentation/eed491b1-e29a-4b16-a0bf-170aeab21160/original"},{"id":"VEUR-ALE-5","t":"Wikipedia: Ale's Stones","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale%27s_Stones"}],"sum":"On midsummer evening, on a high ridge above the Baltic in the far south of Sweden, the sun goes down along the length of a ship made of stone. Fifty-nine boulders stand in its outline on the grass, the largest at either end, and the long axis of the ship runs north-west to south-east, the way the ridge and the coast run. Stand at the south-eastern end and the sun goes down beyond the far end of the hull. Whether the builders meant that to happen is one of the oldest arguments in Scandinavian archaeology.\n\nThe monument is called Ale's Stones, Ales stenar in Swedish, and it stands on the Kåseberga ridge in south-eastern Scania, the province Swedes call Skåne. It is a ship-setting, a type of monument in which upright stones mark out the shape of a vessel, and it is the largest surviving one in Sweden. The usual figure for its length is 67 metres, a little more than half a football pitch, though the latest digital survey, published in the Lund Archaeological Review in 2015, makes it about 70 metres including the stem and a stone known as the rudder-stone, and about 19 metres at its widest. The boulders on the sides number 28 on the north and 27 on the south. A single source gives their weight as up to 5 tonnes each, about as much as an elephant.\n\nLook closely and the stones are not all alike. The side stones are mostly granite, with some gneiss and granodiorite. The stem, the stern, the rudder-stone and a fourth block called the altar-stone are a different rock, Hardeberga sandstone, most likely quarried along the coast south of Simrishamn and brought here. The boulders stand on foundations of smaller stones. The southern side has a suspicious gap, and the Lund authors suggest each side once held 28, giving the ship between 59 and 61 standing stones in its first form.\n\nThe Swedish National Heritage Board calls it probably the most debated single ancient monument in the country, and it is certainly the most visited. A 2012 report for the Board, citing Sweden's growth agency, gives 750,000 visitors a year. Almost every one of them hears a different answer to the same two questions: how old is it, and what was it for?\n\nWritten history catches it late. Around 1515 a land register names a field \"Hesten,\" the stones on the heath. The name Ale's Stones first appears in 1624, in a parish priest's report to King Christian IV of Denmark. A map of 1704 sketches the ship beside the name \"Heestena.\" Then come the hands that moved it. In 1916 a local historical society hired a building contractor to raise the fallen stones. By 1942 the head of the Heritage Board found them half buried in shifting sand. In December 1956 a second restoration went in with a mechanical excavator and a bulldozer, work that the Lund authors write \"has rightly been criticized.\" Every claim about where the stones first stood has to reckon with those two campaigns.\n\nFor a long time the date rested on resemblance. The archaeologist Oscar Montelius placed the ship in the Viking Age, 800 to 1050, by comparison with other ship-settings rather than by digging. Excavation came only in the late twentieth century. From 1987 a Lund University project led by Märta Strömberg dug small trenches around the stones, and in 1989 the diggers found a decorated clay pot inside the ship holding burned human bone, thought to come from a pyre and placed in the pot later. Part of its contents dated to 330 to 540 CE, and a crust of charred food inside to 540 to 650 CE. Birch charcoal from beneath an undisturbed boulder gave the same range. In all, about 13 per cent of the setting has been excavated.\n\nThose digs produced seven radiocarbon dates. Six fall in the first millennium AD, between about AD 250 and 1050 at the widest margin of error, and cluster around 1,400 years ago. On that basis the Heritage Board has suggested a date of creation of about 550 CE, near the end of the Nordic Iron Age. The 2012 report, weighing all the evidence, puts the building between about 600 and 1000 AD. The Lund authors read the sequence as Iron Age and early medieval burials on the spot, followed by the raising of the stone ship in the Viking Age. Strömberg herself first favoured another view, but the results \"soon convinced\" her and the astronomer Curt Roslund that the traditional Viking date was right. Ship-settings across Denmark and Sweden mostly date to the same centuries. That is the mainstream case, and six dates out of seven make it a strong one.\n\nThe seventh date does not fit at all. A sample of charcoal came back at 3650 to 2900 BC, the Early to Middle Neolithic, some 5,500 years old. The Lund article records it as charcoal from a disturbed context at the stem. Another account says it came from soot-covered stones near the ship, thought to be the remains of an older hearth. The Lund authors connect it to something else the ground was hiding. In 2006 a geophysical survey of the plateau showed a huge circle, partly double, 50 metres across, with a rectangle at its centre, only 20 metres from the ship. A trench across it found features that Neolithic specialists took to be the remains of a long dolmen, a Stone Age tomb. The ridge, in other words, was sacred ground thousands of years before any Viking could have stood on it.\n\nThat changes what the stones themselves might be. Strömberg came to suspect that many side boulders had been taken from older megalithic monuments, and in 2003 she titled an article \"Ale's Stones: A Monument of Recycled Boulders?\" Cup-marks, the small carved hollows typical of older rock art, appear on seven of them. If the stones were recycled, an ancient boulder and a young monument can both be true at once. It is an old insight about power. People who wished to borrow the authority of the past had only to move its stones into a new shape and stand among them.\n\nThe astronomical reading has never gone away. The ship has repeatedly been called a sun calendar, and the Heritage Board report notes that the grave and the calendar are the two most widespread ideas about it, though it finds both unsatisfactory, and no grave from the ship's own time has been found. Howard Crowhurst of the French megalith association ACEM describes the alignment of the ship along the summer-solstice sunset as well known, and proposes further alignments with the northern moonsets at the major and minor lunar standstills, the far limits of the moon's long swing along the horizon. Nils-Axel Mörner and Bob Lind went further in 2012, claiming the ship was laid out with the same geometry as Stonehenge. Every such claim depends on the stones still standing where they were first placed, and after the contractor of 1916 and the bulldozer of 1956 that is very hard to test.\n\nSo the ship sits between ages. Its known dates say Iron Age and Viking. Its oldest date, its cup-marked stones and the tomb hidden in the turf beside it say that the ridge was chosen, marked and remembered long before. Stand at the south-eastern end as the midsummer sun goes down beyond the far tip of the hull, and watch the light run along the stones, a line of fire across boulders that may have been old already when someone first set them in the shape of a ship.","qs":["One radiocarbon date says 5,500 years, six say 1,400. Should a single odd result reopen a site's story, or be set aside?","If not a grave or a calendar, what was the ship for?","Why place a stone ship on a clifftop above the sea?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Ales_Stenar_from_pole_camera.jpg/1280px-Ales_Stenar_from_pole_camera.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ales_Stenar_from_pole_camera.jpg","title":"Ales Stenar from pole camera.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Wikimalte","cap":"Ales Stenar seen from about 4 m above ground Image taken using a monopod-mounted camera."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Ale%27s_Stones_in_K%C3%A5seberga_as_seen_from_the_ocean.jpg/1280px-Ale%27s_Stones_in_K%C3%A5seberga_as_seen_from_the_ocean.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ale%27s_Stones_in_K%C3%A5seberga_as_seen_from_the_ocean.jpg","title":"Ale's Stones in Kåseberga as seen from the ocean.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Benjamin Lindholm","cap":"Here you see the impressive coastline of Kåseberga and Ale's Stones as seen from 124 meters above sea level."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Ale_Stenar.jpg/1280px-Ale_Stenar.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ale_Stenar.jpg","title":"Ale Stenar.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Viswanth05","cap":"This is a picture of an archaeological site or a monument in Sweden, number 08cd3afe-c7e8-43ea-bfc4-ef8c051e2168 in the RAÄ Fornsök database."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Ales_stenar_-_Ale%27s_Stones_-_2021_05_29.jpg/1280px-Ales_stenar_-_Ale%27s_Stones_-_2021_05_29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ales_stenar_-_Ale%27s_Stones_-_2021_05_29.jpg","title":"Ales stenar - Ale's Stones - 2021 05 29.jpg","lic":"CC BY 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0","by":"Photo: David Castor","cap":"Ales stenar 29 maj 2021."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Ales_stenar_-_KMB_-_16000300016275.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ales_stenar_-_KMB_-_16000300016275.jpg","title":"Ales stenar - KMB - 16000300016275.jpg","lic":"CC BY 2.5","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5","by":"Bengt A. Lundberg","cap":"Note For documentation reasons, the original description from the National Heritage Board has been retained. Adjustments and alternative descriptions should be ","alt":"Note For documentation reasons, the original description from the National Heritage Board has been retained. Adjustments and alternative descriptions should be"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"59","u":"boulders","h":"Up to 5 tonnes each, forming a 67 m row","s":[165]}],"hs":{"165":["Wikipedia: Ale's Stones (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale%27s_Stones"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-ALE.webp","w":1280,"h":649,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Ales_Stenar_from_pole_camera.jpg/1280px-Ales_Stenar_from_pole_camera.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}