Informant38

The site is atop the Mittelberg, a 252m hill in the Ziegelroda Forest, 180km south-west of Berlin.
Adding a spooky touch is the discovery that, seen from the Mittelberg, the sun sets every June 22 behind the Brocken, the highest mountain in northern Germany. The Brocken is in a direct line of sight on a clear day, 85km to the north-west.
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"This disc, with the oldest concrete representation of the stars in the world, was placed in a pit in the middle of a ringwall during the early Bronze Age," Harald Meller, the chied archaeologist in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said on Wednesday.
"We still don't know if it was a princely grave or a treasure store for holy objects."
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The nearby forest contains 1 000 barrows or princely graves from the period, but little else is known about the lost people, who are not mentioned in ancient Greek or other Mediterranean sources.

IOL(SA) September 25 2002

Archaeologists in Germany believe that they have discovered the world's earliest accurate depiction of the cosmos embossed in gold on a 3,600-year-old Bronze Age disc. They believe that it might also lead them to the site of a German "Stonehenge".
The disc adds to a growing body of evidence about the Bronze Age in Europe which is causing historians to revise radically their understanding of the period. Until recently the era was considered to have been relatively primitive.
Scientists are beginning to discover, however, that Bronze Age man was a highly adept astronomer whose religion was intrinsically linked to the heaven's movements.
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The scientists believe that the disc was originally smeared with rotten eggs. These would have caused a chemical reaction on its bronze surface, which would have turned the disc's background a deep violet colour simulating a night sky out of which the gold-embossed stars would have shone.
Mr Meller and his team are currently excavating the 750ft-high Mittelberg hill near Nebra where the disc was found. The site was originally thought to have been a simple Bronze Age camp, however the archaeologists are now convinced that it was used as an astronomical observatory and a temple in which the disc or discs played a central role.
They point out that the images on the disc correlate exactly with what they have calculated to have been the view of the night sky from Mittelberg hill during the Bronze Age.

Telegraph (UK) 06/10/2002

Compared to the approximately 200 other similar prehistoric mound sites strewn throughout Europe, the Goseck site has striking deviations. Instead of the usual four gates leading into the circular compounds, the Goseck monument has just three. The walled-compound also consists of an unusual formation of concentric rings of man-high wooden palisades. The rings and the gates into the inner circles become narrower as one progresses to the center, indicating perhaps that only a few people could enter the inner-most ring.
Wolfhard Schlosser of the Ruhr University Bochum believes the site's unique construction indicates that it is indeed one of the earliest examples of an astrological observatory.
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The Goseck site, erected by the earliest farming communities between the Stone and Bronze Age, came 3,000 years before the last construction phase of the megaliths of Stonehenge in Great Britain.
Experts are also drawing parallels between the Goseck mounds and another equally spectacular discovery made in the region. "The formation of the site, its orientation and the marking of the winter and summer solstice shows similarities to the world-famous �Nebra disc� � though the disc was created 2,400 years later," Schlosser says.
The 3,600-year-old bronze Nebra disc was discovered just 25 kilometers away from Goseck in the wooded region of Nebra and is considered to be the oldest concrete representation of the cosmos. The 32-centimeter disc is decorated with gold leaf symbols that clearly represent the sun, moon and starts. A cluster of seven dots has been interpreted as the Pleiades constellation as it appeared 3,600 years ago. Schlosser believes the formations on the disc were based on previous astrological observations, which could possibly have been made at Goseck.
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Archaeologists first took note of the location of the Goseck site after aerial images taken in 1991 showed geometrically arranged earth mounds.

Deutsche Welle 08.08.2003