Found: Neolithic Spiderweb Stones in Denmark [View all]

They may have more to do with the sun than with arachnids.
BY VITTORIA TRAVERSO FEBRUARY 13, 2018

FROM ANCIENT NATIVE AMERICANS TO the classical Greeks to today, spiders and their webs have long had symbolic and religious meaning. Now, archaeologists digging at a Neolithic site on Bornholm, Denmark’s easternmost island, have unearthed some mysterious 5,000-year-old stones engraved with what appear to be spiderwebs. But they may not have had anything to do with arachnids.

Their patterns are not vastly different than those on the roughly 300 “sun stones” found since the 1990s at the site of Vasagard, on the same island, which appears to have been a ceremonial center for Neolithic sun worship. (Bornholm is the place in Denmark with the most hours of sunlight per year—so perhaps it is no surprise that prehistoric sun-lovers gathered there.) However, as explained by Finn Ole Son Nielsen, chief archaeologist at the Bornholm Museum, sun stones usually have a simpler set of radiating lines—while the new finds have more intricate lines in between, giving them a distinctly arachnoid look. Researchers have found at least four so far, including one that is somewhere between a sun stone and a spiderweb stone.

More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/neolithic-spiderweb-stones-denmark-archaeology