The Goseck circle
A German earthwork with gates aligned on the winter solstice, built around 4900 BCE.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Goseck is a circular ditch and palisade enclosure 75 metres across with three gateways, two of which frame the sunrise and sunset of the winter solstice. It is the best known of several hundred similar Neolithic enclosures across central Europe. Whether they are observatories, calendars, ritual spaces or all three is unsettled, but the solstice alignment at Goseck is hard to dismiss as accident.