Bronze Age 'infinity pool' hosted supernatural water rituals, archaeologists say

By Tom Metcalfe - Live Science Contributor about 11 hours ago



Sediment show the timber-lined pit was filled with water; archaeologists think it formed an artificial pool that reflected the sky and that it may have been used for water rituals. (Image credit: Cremaschi et al, PLOS One)

A mysterious wooden structure built in Italy more than 3,000 years ago may have been a Bronze Age "infinity pool" that reflected the sky during religious rituals to give onlookers the impression they were looking into another realm, according to new research.

One of the authors of the new study has even likened the pool to England's famous Stonehenge monument, which also symbolically may have led people into another world.

The pool-like structure was likely built sometime between 1436 B.C. and 1428 B.C. — a time of great cultural change in the region, which reinforces the idea that was established for new ritual purposes, said Sturt Manning, an archaeologist at Cornell University in New York and one of the authors of a new paper describing the research.

"As you would have come up to this thing, as soon as you'd been able to start to see the surface, you would have seen effectively the edge of the land around the sky," Manning told Live Science. "And as you got close to it, then you would have just been looking at the [reflected] sky — so you'd have, in a sense, entered another world." Today's infinity pools are similar in their reflective beauty.

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