A few days ago, the curators of the Vesthimmerlands Museum of Aarsin northern Denmark, have announced an extraordinary archaeological discovery: in a excavation campaign promoted by the museum, during the month of January, archaeologists found the traces of an ‘imposing circular structure made of wooden polesprobably of oak, dating back to About 4000 years ago. The structure, due to its similarity with the English site of Stonehenge, was immediately renamed “Woodhenge“, because made of wooden poles.
In the archaeological contexts it is very rare that the wood is preserved: for this reason the Danish archaeologists have not directly found the poles, but a series of holes inside which these were planted. Alone Some traces of the wood that made them up they have been preserved thanks to the wet soil. In an archaeological excavation it is not uncommon to find such ditches, but archaeologists have made with wonder how in this case their succession composed a circle: it is 45 holesabout 2 meters away from each other, which form a circumference of about 30 meters in diameter. At the moment the archaeological investigations are in continuation, to determine whether inside the first circle of poles there is another smaller, concentric, as in the case of Stonehenge.
The megalithic circles of stones, an expression of an ancestral form of litolatry, They are rather common in the British Isles, in Great Britain and Ireland, and are characteristic of the period Neolithicthe last phase of prehistory, even if they remained in use even in the following centuries, up to the Bronze Age and beyond. There were also wooden circlesmuch more difficult to identify for archaeologists due to the perishability of the material. Pending the results of the Analysis of the radioocarbon From the samples extracted from the remains of wood remained in the holes, Danish archaeologists estimate that the circle of Pali found ad Aars may be given to the Neolithic and at the early stages of the Bronze Age, Between 2600 and 1600 BC. C. In fact, other particularly relevant sites already known in the area have been dated to this period, such as some villages, a necropolis, and another circle of wooden poles of considerably smaller size. The creation of circles like this, most likely of common sanctuarieshighlights the level of cohesion of the Neolithic societies of northern Europe, certainly in contact between the two banks of the North Sea.
