A 4,400-year-old life-size wood snake uncovered in Finland might have been a personnel utilized in “magical” routines by a Stone Age shaman, according to a research study launched Monday.
The natural figurine, which was sculpted from a single piece of wood, is 21 inches long and about an inch thick at its best, with what appears to be an extremely snake-like head with its mouth open.
It was discovered completely maintained in a buried layer of peat near the town of Järvensuo, about 75 miles northwest of Helsinki, at an ancient wetland website that archaeologists think was inhabited by Neolithic (late Stone Age) individuals 4,000 to 6,000 years back.
It’s unlike anything else ever discovered in Finland, although a couple of elegant snake figurines have actually been discovered at Neolithic historical sites in other places in the eastern Baltic area and Russia.
“They don’t resemble a real snake, like this one,” University of Turku archaeologist Satu Koivisto stated in an e-mail. “My colleague found it in one of our trenches last summer. … I thought she was joking, but when I saw the snake’s head it gave me the shivers.”
“Personally I do not like living snakes, but after this discovery I have started to like them,” she included.
Koivisto and her associate Antti Lahelma, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki, are the co-authors of the research study on the wood snake released in the journal Antiquity.
They believe it might have been a personnel utilized in apparently wonderful routines by a shaman — somebody who interacted with spirits in a comparable method to the “medicine people” of standard Native American tradition.
It’s believed the ancient individuals of this area practiced such shamanic beliefs, in which the natural world is occupied by wide ranges of typically hidden supernatural spirits or ghosts — a conventional belief that continues today in a few of the remote northern areas of Scandinavia, Europe and Asia.
Ancient rock art from Finland and northern Russia reveals human figures with what appear like snakes in their hands, which are believed to be representations of shamans wielding routine personnels of wood sculpted to appear like snakes. Lahelma stated snakes were considered as specifically spiritual in the area.
“There seems to be a certain connection between snakes and people,” Lahelma informed Antiquity. “This brings to mind northern shamanism of the historical period, where snakes had a special role as spirit-helper animals of the shaman … Even though the time gap is immense, the possibility of some kind of continuity is tantalizing: Do we have a Stone Age shaman’s staff?”
The figurine from Järvensuo definitely appears like a genuine snake. Its slim body is formed by 2 sinuously sculpted bends that continue to a tapered tail. The flat, angular head with its open mouth is specifically practical. Koivisto and Lahelma recommend it looks like a lawn snake or European adder in the act of wriggling or swimming away. The location where it was discovered was most likely a rich water meadow at the time when it was “lost, discarded or intentionally deposited,” the scientists composed.
Wood typically decays away when exposed to oxygen in the air or water, however sediments at the bottoms of swamps, rivers and lakes can cover some natural items and maintain them for countless years.
The website near Järvensuo is believed to have actually been on the coasts of a shallow lake when it was occupied by groups of individuals in the late Stone Age. Recent excavations have actually yielded a chest of natural remains that have actually made it possible for archaeologists to develop a more total record of the website, Koivisto stated. The discovers have actually consisted of a wood tool with a deal with formed like a bear, wood paddles and fishnet drifts made from pine and birch bark.
“What a remarkable thing,” stated Peter Rowley-Conwy, an archaeologist and teacher emeritus of Durham University in the United Kingdom, who was not associated with the research study. “The ‘head’ appears definitely to have been carved to shape.”
But he bewared about ascribing higher significance to it: “A skeptic might wonder whether the sinuous shape was deliberate, or an accidental result of four millennia of waterlogging,” he stated in an e-mail. “I have worked on various bog sites with preserved wood, and wood fragments can be considerably distorted.”
Koivisto cautions that artifacts like the “snake staff” might be lost as numerous wetland historical sites dry up.
“Wetlands are more crucial to us than ever previously, since of their vulnerability and deterioration of delicate natural information sources [from] drain, land usage and environment modification,” she stated “We have to hurry, before these valuable materials will be gone for good.”
