an artificial island with a wood and stone structure older than Stonehenge

In several rural areas of Scotland there has been an old tradition for centuries: when the level of some lakes drops after periods of drought or storms, strange rows of stones and dark wood sometimes appear briefly, the neighbors call “the traces of the ancients.” For a long time they were thought to be simply natural remains… until archaeologists discovered that many actually belonged to hidden human constructions underwater for thousands of years.

The artificial island hidden under the waters of Scotland. At the beginning of May something unusual happened in Scotland: a small artificial island built some time ago reappeared more than five thousand years with wood, branches and stone, even before Stonehenge. What today seems like just a rocky islet lost in a lake on the Isle of Lewis hid under water a complex human structure built during the Neolithica time when British communities were still taking their first steps towards large collective projects.

He find It not only forces us to reconsider the antiquity of the so-called Scottish “crannogs”, but also the organizational capacity of societies that were already capable of completely transforming an aquatic landscape thousands of years before the most famous large megalithic constructions in Europe.

A wooden platform from before the pyramids. Apparently, archaeologists discovered that the islet of Loch Bhorgastail originally began as a huge circular wooden platform about 23 meters in diameter covered with layers of branches and vegetation. As the centuries passed, different generations expanded and reinforced the structure by adding new layers of stone and brushwood until transforming it into the small island visible today.

The dating places the first phase of construction between 3800 and 3300 BCthat is, several centuries before the best known phases of Stonehenge and a lot before the pyramids Egyptians. The investigation It also demonstrates that those Neolithic communities not only built funerary monuments or stone circles, but were also capable of modifying entire lakes to build artificial spaces isolated from the continent.

Under the water a lost stone path appeared. One of the most striking discoveries was the location of a stone road submerged bridge that connected the island to the shore of the lake. Today it remains hidden underwater, but in the past it provided easy access to the artificial platform before lake levels and the natural environment changed.

Researchers believe that this access demonstrates that the island was not a simple symbolic structure lost in the middle of the water, but a regularly used place by entire communities. The fact that the construction was modified and reused for thousands of years (from the Neolithic to the Iron Age) further indicates that the place maintained special importance for entire generations.

Remains of banquets and meetings. Not only that. Hundreds of fragments appeared around the island neolithic ceramic belonging to bowls and vessels, many of them still retaining remains of food adhered to the interior surfaces. Archaeologists believe that this points to activities related communitys with meetings, food preparation and possible ritual banquets.

The enormous amount of work required to build an artificial island in the middle of a lake also suggests the existence of societies much more organized than is normally imagined for that time. They were not small improvised groups surviving in isolation, but communities capable of coordinating labor, resources and planning over long periods of time.

Another way to explore the past underwater. Much of the progress has been possible thanks to a new technique developed specifically to study very shallow water areas, an especially problematic environment for archeology because terrestrial and underwater methods often fail precisely in that intermediate zone.

The researchers combined drones, waterproof cameras and stereophotogrammetry systems capable of generating continuous three-dimensional models both above and below water. The result has made it possible to digitally reconstruct the entire island and document structures invisible from the surface with centimeter precision. Until now, many of these environments were considered a kind of “blind zone” for archaeology.

Scotland could hide hundreds. The Loch Bhorgastail case is especially important because researchers believe that there are hundreds of crannogs spread across the Scottish lochs and many could hide much older origins than previously thought.

For decades it was believed that most belonged to the Iron Age or medieval times, but recent discoveries are pushing their origins back thousands of years, until the Neolithic. This opens the possibility that more artificial platforms, submerged paths and remains of human activities at a surprisingly early time in European history remain hidden beneath the calm waters of many Scottish lochs.

The island changes the image of British Neolithic societies. The most fascinating of the discovery is that it forces us to abandon the simplified image of Neolithic communities as dispersed and technically limited groups. Building an artificial island of wood and stone in the middle of a lake required planning, knowledge of the aquatic environment, transportation of materials, and large-scale social cooperation.

And all this was happening in Scotland ago more than five thousand yearseven before some of the most famous prehistoric monuments on the planet were built. Beneath the dark waters of a seemingly normal lake, a an extraordinary test of the extent to which those ancient societies were much more complex and ambitious than was believed.

Image | University of Southampton

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