Archaeologist suggests UK’s 4,000-year-old ‘Seahenge’ was built to ‘extend summer’

New research suggests that a mysterious Bronze Age wooden circle known as ‘Seahenge’ on the east coast of England was built more than 4,000 years ago to bring back warmer weather during extremely cold periods.

This theory is a new attempt to explain a buried structure – an approximate circle about 7.5 meters in diameter, formed from 55 split oak trunks surrounding a “horseshoe” of five larger oak poles around a large inverted oak trunk – which was controversially excavated and moved to museum in 1999

Other researchers have suggested that it was built to commemorate an important person who died, or that it was a site of “sky burials” in which carrion-eating birds pecked the dead.

But the idea that Seahenge and the circle of buried beams found next to it were built to “extend summer” fits with what was known about the climate at the time, he said. David Nancearchaeologist at the University of Aberdeen in Great Britain and author of new research.

Related: Prehistoric henge discovered accidentally in England in search of an Anglo-Saxon hermit

Construction took place during “a long period of low atmospheric temperatures and harsh winters and late spring, which placed stress on these early coastal communities,” he said in a statement. statement. “It seems most likely that the common goal of these monuments was to end this existential threat.”

Nance detailed his study of the two Seahenge structures – known formally as Holme I and Holme II – in a research paper published April 2 in the journal GeoJournal.

Ancient beams

Nance said dating using dendrochronology – a technique of examining annual tree rings still visible in ancient beams – showed that both Seahenge rings were built from trees felled in the spring of 2049 B.C.

He noticed that the horseshoe of the five larger posts inside the main circle of Seahenge appeared to be aligned sunrise during the summer solstice. Perhaps it was like a cuckoo’s cage, designed to extend summer by keeping the bird singing – a belief described in ancient folklore, he suggested.

The exhibition reveals the 4,000-year-old remains of Seahenge. (Photo credit: Malcolm Park/Alamy)

Nance explained that it was believed that the cuckoo – a symbol of fertility for the ancient Britons – had stopped singing summer solstice and returning to the “Other World”, taking with it the warm summer weather.

He proposed that Seahenge and a second wooden circle built next to it be used for various rituals, but with the same intention: “to put an end to the extremely cold weather.”

Seahenge gained national attention in late 1998 when erosion near the village of Holme-nexto-the-Sea exposed the beams and trunk of the central tree. However, the local population had known about it for many years.

The structure took its name from British newspapers, which compared it to the famous one Stonehenge a monument in Wiltshire which many archaeologists believe was a Neolithic ceremonial center and burial place.

Controversial excavations

In the 1990s, Seahenge occupied a salt marsh near the beach, protected from the sea by dunes and mudflats. Authorities feared that further erosion there would destroy the wooden monument, so in 1999 it was completely excavated.

However, the excavations aroused controversy as many people believed that the monument should remain in place questions arose about the role of the archaeological TV program “Time Team”, in which a special episode presented the excavations.

Partly as a result of this controversy, an ancient wooden circle built next to Seahenge – Holme II – has been left near the beach and is being monitored for erosion.

Archaeologist Brian FaganA professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the latest research, told Live Science that the detailed climate data from the latest study means researchers can now take a closer look at the connections between archaeological sites and climate change in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

“This is an imaginative look at a complex problem that yields both immaterial and climatological interpretations,” he said in an email. “It’s an original approach, but it will certainly be controversial.”

AND Stefan Berghan archaeologist at the University of Galway in Ireland, who was also not involved, said the paper provided a “very useful framework” for insight into the beliefs and religions of Bronze Age peoples.

“As archaeologists, we too often shy away from stepping outside our comfort zone of hard physical evidence,” he told Live Science in an email. “However, archeology often comes alive when you step outside of that comfort zone, and Nance’s article is a perfect example.”