Qualla: Goseck Circle

Goseck Circle: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwaller, CC BY-SA 3.0. From the air, in a dry summer, a buried ditch gives itself away. Wheat rooted in loosened soil stays green a few days longer than the crop beside it, and the difference draws the outline of whatever lies underneath. In 1991 the aerial archaeologist Otto Braasch was flying over farmland near Goseck in Saxony-Anhalt when the drought-stressed crop showed him a set of concentric rings pressed into a field. It took another decade of digging to establish what he had photographed: a timber enclosure raised around 4900 BC, some two thousand years before the first stones were set at Stonehenge, with gates that open onto the midwinter sun.

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Image: Jwaller | CC BY-SA 3.0

Goseck Circle: Reading the Rings

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jwaller, CC BY-SA 3.0. The remains were vulnerable to the plough, so the state heritage office for Saxony-Anhalt decided on excavation and brought in the Institute for Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. François Bertemes and Peter Biehl opened a major dig in 2002 and kept re...

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Image: Jwaller | CC BY-SA 3.0

Goseck Circle: The Trouble with the Word Observatory

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. Goseck is signposted in German as the Sonnenobservatorium, and promotional material has called it one of the oldest solar observatories in the world. The state archaeologists and the local association that looks after the site are more careful: they present it as a ritual or cult...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Goseck Circle: What the Ground Held

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User MOdmate on de.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Radiocarbon dates put construction close to 4900 BC. Pottery sherds in the stroke-ornamented ware style belong to around 4700 BC, which suggests the enclosure stayed in use for two or three centuries - long enough for great-grandchildren to walk through the same gates. The excav...

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Image: User MOdmate on de.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Goseck Circle: Rebuilt in Oak

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Einsamer Schütze, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the excavation ended, archaeologists and state officials put the palisade back up: 1,675 oak poles, each two and a half metres tall. The woodworkers used hand tools so the surfaces would carry the right marks rather than the smoothness of a modern mill. The reconstructed en...

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Image: Einsamer Schütze | CC BY-SA 3.0

Goseck Circle: The Ground It Chose

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The circle sits on open farmland between Naumburg and Weißenfels, on a slope that rises gently to the south, not far from where the Unstrut empties into the Saale at the edge of the region called the Leipzig Bay. It is good soil and it has been farmed continuously for a very long...

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Image: Kenny Arne Lang Antonsen | CC BY-SA 4.0