A group of archaeologists has found a 4,000-year-old sanctuary similar to Stonehenge in an industrial estate in Tiel (Netherlands), the official Twitter account of the city announced on Wednesday.
It is believed that the place served as a kind of solar calendar (Video capture).
Experts believe that the shrine, which consisted of several mounds of earth and occupied the extension of four soccer fields, was surely an important place where people went on special dates, performed rituals and buried their dead, reports RT.
The site also has three earth mounds, the largest of which has a diameter of 20 meters. It is believed that this served as a kind of solar calendar, as it was surrounded by a shallow ditch with several passages.
Archaeologists found offerings in places where the sun shone directly through the openings (Video capture).
Archaeologists also found offerings in places where the sun shone directly through the openings, human remains of 60 people, animal skeletons and valuables such as a spearhead made of bronze.
A unique glass bead
The find that has surprised them the most is a glass bead from Mesopotamia (historical region located in what is now Iraq and Syria), which has become the oldest ever found in the Netherlands.
A reconstruction of what the place would have looked like originally (Twitter gemTiel).
According to Stijn Arnoldussen, special professor of Late Prehistory at the University of Groningen, it is a special object because at that time glass was not manufactured in the place where it was found, so it was a material unknown to many of the locals, says RT.
For her part, Ilse Schuuring, municipal archaeologist of Tiel, explained that the excavations began in 2017 and an area of approximately 22 hectares was analyzed, an unprecedented fact for the archaeological research of that European country.
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GML