In Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, archaeologists have found several rubbing stones from the Neolithic Age. These grinding tools, around 7000 years old, were apparently deposited by the early peasant cultures of this area as part of rituals and festivals in mines. So far, what they symbolize was unclear. Now more precise analyzes of three such rice stone landfills give new insights into which circumstances the tools may have been ritually buried and what importance they had for the early farmers.
From about 5500 BC, in the Neolithic Age, the first farmers settled in Central Europe. The people of linear band ceramics and the following stab ceramics immigrated from transdanubia in today’s Hungary. Instead of hunting and collecting, they produced their food for the first time, through cattle breeding and agriculture. Her most important equipment included so -called rubbing stones. These tools made it possible to efficiently process grain into flour and thus to make it usable for a predictable diet including storage. Ribbings consisted of two parts: a massive friction plate as a lower trailer and a second, such as football -sized stone as a runner, with which the grain was rubbed by hand.
The fact that these grinding stones were important for the Neolithic farmers also demonstrate these devices in the context of rituals and festivals. These stones were symbolically buried. The revolves probably had a reference to the rhythm of cultivation and harvest, day and night, as well as fertility, like earlier studies. Appropriate landfills have so far been found primarily in France and Belgium. In recent years, deprivation of rubbing stones in Central Germany have been discovered for the first time.
Rapid stones from Germany examined
Three of these finds have now examined researchers around Erik Zamzow from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Using the appearance and arrangement of the stone tools, they wanted to find out what importance the ribbon deposits had for the farmers at that time and what can be seen from them about their lives. In two cases, the stones were in the area around the Goseck district ditch in Saxony-Anhalt. This system is considered one of the earliest sun observatories. The first find comprises two sub-trailer panels from a pit in a nave that was built between 5200 and 5000 BC. These riplord components date from the time of linear band ceramics and are therefore older than the sun observatory, which was built from 4900 BC.
The second ray find-three plates and two runners-, on the other hand, was laid down in a pit between 4795 and 4696 BC together with the bones of a middle-aged woman, as radiocarbonds showed. This landfill took place at the same time to build the observatory in the stab ceramic culture, the team reports. A third set made of ribbon was discovered in two layers in Sömmerda in today’s Thuringia, also in a pit near a linear band ceramic house.
Degree of wear and tear reveals the time presentation of the farmers
All of the revolves discovered in Germany were carefully shaped and maintained, arranged in pairs and aligned from the east to the west. In addition, all stones had been used and worn out by the hard work, as the analyzes showed. This speaks against the storage of the grinding tools for later use and for a ritual resignation, explain Zamzow and his colleagues. “The traditional form of every excavation is the result of daily work for years and decades,” explains senior author Roberto Risch from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. However, since the stones, which were laid down together as a set, were always worn out differently, the team suspects that the rubbing stones could symbolize a time cycle and different generations of a group. The range from production to the end of the end of a stone could be an allegory on the time between life and death.
“The results of the study cause us to assume that the core idea behind the landfills of the tools is the time that is expressed in the different stages of their ‘biography’,” says Zamzow. “The frame stones were mainly used by women. It could indicate references to cycles from birth, life and death in the deposits. ” The stones thus testify to the stones of the complex time presentation of the Neolithic farmers, which goes beyond the rhythm of the annual harvests, the researchers conclude. In addition to daily and seasonal periods, they stand primarily for the woman’s life. Follow -up studies on rapid stones from other sites in Europe should now check this interpretation.
Source: State Office for the Preservation of Monuments and Archeology Saxony-Anhalt (LDA)-State Museum for History, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Specialist articles: Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, DOI: 10.1016/J.Jasrep.2025.104998