A gigantic 5,000-year-old complex of long burial mounds and stone-lined tombs has been unearthed in Poland, after archaeologists investigated lines in crops in a field that they had seen in a satellite photograph.
Archaeologists began excavating the rural site near the town of Dębiany, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northeast of Krakow, more than two years ago. They have now unearthed seven Neolithic tombs, as well as the remains of an early medieval fortress and a burial of two Bronze Age horses. But the full extent of the old cemetery is not yet known.
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Archaeologists now think it consists of a dozen burial mounds, each between 130 and 160 feet (40 and 50 meters) long, made of earthworks, stones, and wooden pole palisades that have now rotted away. They are believed to be a relic of the area’s prehistoric settlement by the Neolithic Funnel Beaker people, named after the distinctive ceramic vessels they made and are believed to have been Europe’s first farmers.
“The Dębiany megalithic cemetery is one of the largest and most interesting sites of its kind in Central Europe,” archaeologists Marcin Przybyła and Jan Bulas told Live Science in an email. “It provides us with extraordinary data on the funerary customs of the Funnel Beaker culture.”
Bulas, an independent archaeologist from Krakow, first noticed that the straight lines visible in a satellite photograph of the field, the result of subtle differences in crop growth, could be caused by the underground remains of a four-sided structure.
Bulas and Przybyła visited the site and used magnetic gradiometers to measure small variations on Earth. magnetic field and reveal where the underlying terrain had been altered in the past.
The four-sided shape that Bulas had seen in satellite photography turned out to be an early medieval fortress and moat from the 9th and 10th centuries, before Poland’s first kingdom was established in 1025.
But excavations in 2019 and 2020 also revealed the long Neolithic burial mounds, believed to be about 5,500 years old, on which the medieval fortress was unknowingly built.
Although they have now eroded into the landscape, the burial mounds were once much taller, Przybyła said. Science in Poland. They were made by piling earth on a central tomb lined with stone and reinforced with palisades of wooden posts; the posts have now rotted away and only traces of their post holes remain.
Researchers have yet to find skeletal remains in the central tombs, but they did detect traces of Neolithic burials in the surrounding earth embankments, Przybyła said.
Przybyła and Bulas told Live Science that the archaeological team had also recently unearthed a grave at the site where two horses were buried side by side, along with part of a bridle. They have dated that tomb to the mid-Bronze Age in the region, about 3,500 years ago.
Funnel glass people
The Funnel Beaker people who built the ancient burial mounds near Dębiany spread across central Europe from about 4100 BC. C.
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They are believed to be farmers who migrated to the region from what is now Spain and France, and were the descendants of people who had emigrated from the Balkans, where they had adopted earlier Middle Eastern agricultural practices.
Archaeologists have unearthed long burial mound cemeteries made by people from the Funnel Beaker in other parts of Poland, as well as in Germany and southern Scandinavia. One of the best known is hidden in a forest in the central Polish region of Kujawy; the huge burial mounds are sometimes called Polish pyramids.
But the ancient cemetery near Dębiany is believed to be one of the largest Funnel Beaker burial mound complexes found so far, Przybyła said.
The archaeologists plan to continue their excavations to learn more about the Neolithic burial mounds and tombs, and also about the remains of the medieval fortress and the moat that first brought them to the site.
So far, archaeologists have found no evidence that the fortress was permanently inhabited (they believe it may have been a military camp) and no similar structures have been found in Poland.
Przybyła and Bulas said it was a “unique discovery” that would help them study the fortification techniques used during the 9th and 10th centuries, which was a turbulent time in Polish history.
Originally posted on Live Science.