By DPA
Goseck (Germany) : Archaeologists digging at the place where an amazing Bronze Age disc was found in Germany have turned up a body and remains of a Stone Age building, adding to the riddle around one of the world’s biggest archaeological sensations of the past decade.
Andreas Northe, giving the results of this summer’s digging on the remote hill in eastern Germany, said, “We found a child’s grave, a cache of stone tools and some remains from a long-house.”
Excavation was done at a spot on a line of sight from the place where amateurs using metal detectors in 1999 found the Nebra celestial disc, a 3,600-year-old depiction of the sun, moon and stars which is believed to be the oldest extant calculator of the seasons.
Controversy has raged since 2001 about what the gold-and-green disc was for, who its owners were and whether it could be a scientific hoax.
Digs have revealed that the deserted hill in woods near Goseck may have been a town for millenia. The “temple of the sun” has been reconstructed as a tourist attraction.
Northe dated the latest finds by his 13-member team to the Stone Age and said they included burned pieces of plaster wall.
Nothing comparable had ever been found before and it would be possible now to study how Stone Age houses looked from the outside. The house measures 6 metres by 20 metres.
The grave was of a child aged between one and three who had been buried with a fired-clay bottle, “a provision for the after-life”, Northe said.