Swedish Stonehenge

Last month, we reported on Geography Professor Vincent Malmstrom's investigation of the astronomical alignments of Central American archeological sites and his theories about the origins of Mesoamerican Indian cultures. Since then, we have learned about field research Malmstrom is conducting in Sweden, where last fall he and James Harter '79 discovered the solistic orientation of yet another prehistoric monument. This one is composed of 58 five-ton boulders arranged to form the outline of a ship 67 meters long and 19 meters wide.

Because of the ship's position in relation to the azimuth of the summer and winter solstices, and because approximately 300 tons of red granite had to be transported by sea from 50 kilometers away in order to build the structure, Malmstrom and Harter argue that it doesn't fit the pattern of other ship-settings, as they are called, built during the Iron Age. Although Swedish archeologists have favored an Iron Age dating of 400-1050 A.D., the Malmstrom-Harter theory, just published in a Swedish scientific journal, maintains that the large ship-setting studied at Kaseberga, on the Baltic coast, is actually of megalithic origins, dating back to about 2000 B.C.

Malmstrom and Harter postulate that the tremendous effort required to build the ship, along with its solistic orientation, link it with other megalithic monuments in Europe, including Stonehenge, which was positioned to mark the summer solstice and apparently enabled its builders to calculate eclipses. The Kaseberga ship-setting was constructed, the Dartmouth investigators claim, because the megalithic culture had no system of writing and needed a way to remember the extreme positions of the sun in order to observe the important yearly midsummer and midwinter religious feasts.