• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

New Satellite Images Reveal Europe’s Hidden Bronze Age Megastructures

November 20, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Using satellite images and aerial photography, archaeologists have uncovered a network of previously unknown and huge Bronze Age sites at the heart of Europe. The team believe these newly identified structures could explain how contemporary megaforts, the largest prehistoric constructions made before the Iron Age, came into being. 

The research was led by archaeologists from University College Dublin and colleagues in Serbia and Slovenia, who “stitched together” the images and photos to give an impression of the prehistoric landscape of the southern Carpathian Basin. Through this work, they were able to find over 100 sites that belonged to a complex ancient society. 

Advertisement

It is likely that their use of defensible enclosures served as precursors to the large hillforts that have become iconic examples of Bronze Age construction. 

“Some of the largest sites, we call these mega-forts, have been known for a few years now, such as Gradište Iđoš, Csanádpalota, Sântana or the mind-blowing Corneşti Iarcuri enclosed by 33 km [21 miles] of ditches and eclipsing in size the contemporary citadels and fortifications of the Hittites, Mycenaeans or Egyptians,” lead author Associate Professor Barry Molloy, UCD School of Archaeology, said in a statement.

“What is new, however, is finding that these massive sites did not stand alone, they were part of a dense network of closely related and codependent communities. At their peak, the people living within this lower Pannonian network of sites must have numbered into the tens of thousands.”

All the sites discovered by this work were located in the hinterlands of the Tisza river, a major river in Central and Eastern Europe, which now extends through several national boundaries. As such, the previously unknown communities of people who lived at these sites are being collectively referred to as the Tisza Site Group (TSG).  

An aerial photo of a network of fields showing a grid of ancient archaeological sites that appear as small dark impression in the landscape.

The Tisza Site Group (TSG) are thought to have been a sophisticated community that lived and cooperated along the banks of the Tisza river.

Image courtesy of Professor Barry Molloy, University College Dublin

Almost all of the TSG sites are within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of one another and lie along a river corridor created by the Tisza river and the Danube. This has led the archaeologists to believe that the communities were likely cooperative, allowing them to spread out like this. 

Interestingly, the research indicates that the TSG were important centers of innovation in prehistoric Europe and functioned as a major hub for the region at a time when the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and New Kingdom Egyptians were at their height – around 1500 to 1200 BCE. 

This is commonly regarded as a major turning point in prehistoric Europe’s story. During the second millennium BCE, so it appears, the advanced military and earthwork technologies of the society spread across Europe once they collapsed around 1200 BCE. The importance of this group of people now helps explain why material culture and iconography from across Europe was so similar at this time. 

“Our understanding of how their society worked challenges many aspects of European prehistory. It would be extremely unlikely for each of these 100+ sites to have been individual chiefdoms competing with each other,” Molloy added.

Advertisement

“Uniquely for prehistoric Europe, we are able to do more than identify the location of a few sites using satellite imagery but have been able to define an entire settled landscape, complete with maps of the size and layout of sites, even down to the locations of people’s homes within them. This really gives an unprecedented view of how these Bronze Age people lived with each other and their many neighbours.”

“However, this was no peaceful time of plenty. Major innovations in warfare and organised violence took place at this time. The scale of this society indicates it was relevant and powerful on a European stage and between force of arms and major defensible features at settlements, they were well equipped to defend their gains.”

How it’s done

Archaeology is more than just trowels and holes. To identify these new sites, the team used a barrage of cutting-edge imaging technologies to map out this ancient landscape.

archaeologist wearing blue hat, red hoody and hi viz vest stands in deep hole at excavation site

Armed with the findings from the satellite images, the team could begin their excavations on the ground.

Image courtesy of Professor Barry Molloy, University College Dublin

“We tested the findings from satellite images on the ground using survey, excavation, and geophysical prospection,” Molloy explained. “The vast majority of sites were established between 1600 and 1450 [BCE] and virtually all of them came crashing down around 1200 [BCE], being abandoned en masse.”

Advertisement

“1200 [BCE] was a striking turning point in Old World prehistory, with kingdoms, empires, cities, and whole societies collapsing within a few decades throughout a vast area of southwest Asia, north Africa, and southern Europe.”

“It is fascinating to discover these new polities and to see how they were related to well-known influential societies yet sobering to see how they ultimately suffered a similar fate in wave of crises that struck this wider region.”

The paper is published in PLOS ONE.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – FIFA backs down on threat to fine Premier clubs who play South American players
  2. U.S. House passes abortion rights bill, outlook poor in Senate
  3. Two children killed in missile strikes on Yemen’s Marib – state news agency
  4. We’ve Breached Six Of The Nine “Planetary Boundaries” For Sustaining Human Civilization

Source Link: New Satellite Images Reveal Europe’s Hidden Bronze Age Megastructures

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version