Archaeologists Excavating Europe’s Oldest Civilization

By Linda Orlando

For the last several years, archaeologists have been steadily working to excavate a network of dozens of temples that are believed to be older than the pyramids in Egypt, and even older than Stonehenge. More than 150 gigantic monuments have already been identified and unearthed beneath fields and cities in Austria, Germany, and Slovakia. The temples are built from wood and earth and are surrounded by fences and ramparts that extend for thousands of feet. The fortifications and buildings, built between 4800BC and 4600BC, are believed to have been constructed by a civilization based on farming and agriculture. The people were obviously religious, based on the number of temples discovered, and the lived in communal longhouses grouped around large village areas, each surrounding a central temple. The people raised large herds of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and fashioned tools out of stone, wood, and bones. They also fabricated small ceramic statues of humans and animals, as well as large amounts of geometrically decorated pottery. The established community seems to have died out after about 200 years. The discovery is so new, and the excavations are so preliminary, that this culture has not even been given a name yet.

Archaeologists and historians have traditionally believed that the design and building of large architecture began after the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, but because of the discovery of these Stone Age temples, the study of prehistoric Europe has been turned upside down. Researchers believe that hundreds of these religious civilizations were constructed across a huge belt of land across Europe, and because of the breadth of this find, archaeologists are beginning to re-evaluate similar finds in central Europe that have been mostly undated. The most complex of these compounds excavated so far lies beneath the center of the city of Dresden, and consists of what appears to be a sacred internal area surrounded by two palisades, surrounded by three earthen banks and four networks of ditches. Another village complex and temple found near Leipzig contained over 200 longhouses, which indicates that the population of that complex would have been up to 300 people with a settlement containing up to 20 large communal buildings.

These heavily fortified monuments discovered so far seem to be the result of competition among the emerging Neolithic tribal groups that grew out of the establishment of farming cultures in the center of Europe. It is believed that these early Neolithic monument-building societies lasted less than 200 years and then died out, but the exact reason the culture collapsed is not known. However, it could have been due to the loss of either the ability to build monuments of this size or the need to build them in the first place. The next era of history known to contain monuments of this scale did not occur until the Middle Bronze Age, 3,000 years later. So far the investigation into these massive temples suggests that each was ritually decommissioned, with the ditches surrounding the central complex being deliberately filled in.

As archaeologists have worked to excavate these Stone Age temples, they have also unearthed several other intriguing mysteries. Each complex was used for only a few generations, and the central sacred area was always almost exactly the same size. And each circular ditch enclosing a compound required the removal of the exact same volume of earth, no matter what the diameter of the circle was. They reduced the depth and/or width of each ditch compared to the diameter of the circle, so that the volume of dirt removed was always the same for each circle. Archaeologists speculate that this was done so that the work required to dig each ditch would be the same no matter what the circumference of the ditch was. The culture may have required that each ditch be dug in the same number of days, perhaps to satisfy the requirements of some sort of religious calendar or ritual. The multiple ditches and palisades surrounding each complex do not appear to have been built for defensive purposes, but rather were probably designed to keep the ordinary citizens from being able to view the sacred rituals taking place inside the inner sanctum of the complex.

The Saxony state government's Heritage Department has been directing the archaeological investigations taking place in Dresden. According to the senior archaeologist in charge of the project, Harald Staeuble, "Our excavations have revealed the degree of monumental vision and sophistication used by these early farming communities to create Europe's first truly large scale earthwork complexes."