An excavation on one of the Bruchhauser Steine rock formations in in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has unearthed evidence that the Iron Age hillfort on the summit was a ritual site. Two iron axes placed at right angles to each other and the remains of specially mined and processed quartz in a hard-to-reach location indicate a complex ritual took place there.
The Bruchhauser Steine are four large porphyry formations visible for miles over the hilly landscape. The highest of them, Bornstein is 300 feet high. Next are Ravenstein (236 feet), Goldstein (197 feet) and finally Feldstein (148 feet). Feldstein is the only one where people can easily reach the summit thanks to a staircase carved into the rock. There’s a cross at the summit of Feldstein now so the religious appeal of the site is undiminished to this day.
The two socketed axes were discovered last year by a metal detectorist who recognized that their careful positioning could not have been a natural process. He reported the find to the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL). The subsequent excavation of the find site revealed a far more complex depositional context.
Beneath the axes is a pit carved into the rock. It had been deliberately filled with soil, and the excavation of its contents uncovered quartz fragments, a flat stone slab with marks of use and a rounded stone known as a hammerstone that was used to crush rocks.
The analysis of these materials has allowed specialists to reconstruct the sequence of actions that took place at that point more than two millennia ago, sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. According to Dr. Zeiler, the sequence began with the opening of a small cavity in the rock to extract the quartz embedded within it, a task that required considerable effort given the hardness of the material and the exposure of the location to harsh weather conditions.
Once the quartz had been obtained, it was processed immediately on the stone slab itself, using the crusher to reduce it to fragments only a few millimeters in diameter. Once this operation was completed, the cavity was refilled with the crushed quartz and with the very tools used in the process, that is, the slab and the crusher. Finally, on the leveled surface of the sealed pit, the two iron axes were deposited in the arrangement that the detectorist was able to observe millennia later.
This difficult, complicated procedure took place on an exposed promontory where mining the quartz veins in the porphyry was much harder than it would have been just at the base of the rock. Archaeologists hypothesize that the quartz at the high elevation was deliberated mined because it was believed to hold magical properties due to its proximity to the spirit realm.
The discovery of the quartz ritual and axes on the summit sheds new light on the Iron Age walls that surround the rock formations. There is no evidence of permanent settlement, so walls did not defend a hillfort in the typical sense of the word. Instead, they served as the boundary walls of a sacred enclosure.
The Bruchhauser Steine Foundation will exhibit some of the finds in a new display case at the site’s visitors center. The iron axes cannot be displayed yet because they need conservation and stabilization to ensure they don’t corrode now that they’ve been removed from their protected environment. Replicas will be installed in their place, but the original stone slab, the hammerstone and fragments of quartz will be on display.
* This article was originally published here
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