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Archaeologists discovered an ancient graveyard with mostly children interred between 800 and 200 BC.
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With the remains of nearly 40 children, all under age 6, experts don’t know the reason behind this Norwegian site.
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Symmetrical stone circles painstakingly placed marked each individual grave.
A cluster of 41 stone circles near Fredrikstad in southeast Norway puzzled a team of archaeologists upon the initial discovery. What they found under the circles didn’t help solve any mysteries.
Each of the symmetrical stone circles—ranging in diameter from 3 to 6 feet, some with another stone placed in the center, and with the stones placed side by side like cobblestones in a street—covered remnants of pottery shards and burnt bones. Examinations showed that 39 of the 41 graves were either infants or children under 6 years old, according to a statement from the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The other two graves held the remains of adults, but were set slightly away from the larger group.
The experts dated the bones and other artifacts to between 800 and 200 BC, meaning the children were buried over the span of hundreds of years, not suddenly. “The field of children’s graves is unique in a Norwegian context,” the museum wrote in the statement, “and opens up many questions to which the answers are still unknown: Why were the children buried in a separate place? Why here? And how did they hold on to this tradition for several hundred years.”
Archaeologists discovered the stones a few inches underground amid planning to expand a local quarry.
The archaeologists hoped to originally find additional traces from the Stone Age, but weren’t prepared for graves, which span the transition between the Bronze and Iron ages. “The children’s graves were found in an area rich in cultural heritage,” the museum’s statement said, “including many rock carvings from this period that speak of voyages and sun worship. The newly discovered children’s graves open up new questions about the people who lived back then.”
Excavation leader Guro Fossum tells Science Norway that they thought the stones must represent graves when they were first found. “There was something special about the whole site,” she said.
Fossum continued:
“The graves are very close together. They must have been in an open landscape, with thoroughfares nearby, so everyone would have known about them. Cooking pits and fireplaces around the site suggest that gatherings and ceremonies were held in connection with burials. Additionally, all the graves were so nice and meticulously crafted. Each stone was sourced from a different location and placed precisely in the formation. We wondered who put in so much effort.”
When the results came in that the remains were children’s graves, “it made sense,” Fossum said. “This was done with so much care.”
The well-preserved site was kept pristine for centuries. “The dating shows that the burial site was used over a long period,” Fossum said in Science Norway, “so they couldn’t all have died in the same natural disaster or outbreak of disease or epidemic.”
The museum exhibition reconstructs a stone grave and shows the process for archaeological excavation, as well as the remaining mystery of the stone circles.
In the meantime, the search for answers continues. “Analyses of the pottery fragments can tell us a lot,” Fossum said. “It doesn’t appear that all the vessels were containers for burnt bones; some were placed between the graves, and we are very curious about what was inside them.”
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