At the winter solstice on December 21, Germany officially reopened a replica of a great wooden circle that is believed to be a temple of the sun built by a lost culture 6,800 years ago.  The circle of posts, in a flat river plain at Goseck south of Berlin, has mystified scientists since its discovery in 1991 by an archaeologist studying the landscape from the air. An excavation found post holes and what may be the remains of ritual fires.

Goseck has been dubbed the German Stonehenge, though it is twice as old as the Stonehenge megalithic circle in southern England and has no stones. The original wood rotted away long ago, but new palisades, or wooden walls, were constructed at Goseck this year.

In a public works scheme, 2,300 oaken poles were erected in a circle on the same site over a seven-month period, with gateways opening to the points of the compass where the sun rises and sets on December 21. There are now two concentric wooden palisades, each 2.5 metres high, as well as a ditch and an earthen wall.

A winter solstice festival with flaming torches and laser lights and an audience of thousands atteneded the opening ceremony as the sun set over the southwest gate of the 75-metre-diameter circle.

The Goseck Circle was apparently erected by Europe's first civilization, long before the cultures of Mesopotamia or the pyramids of Egypt, and is one of the best studied of 150 monumental sites arrayed through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia.

Each comprises four concentric rings of earth and wood, indicating a common culture using a standard design. The realization that a very early European farming people built such vast sites has arrived in little more than a decade. Textbooks that assume late Stone Age Europe was far more primitive than the Middle East must be rewritten.

The Goseck Circle is claimed to have been a sort of calendar that told the people farming the fertile plain when it was time to begin counting the days till spring planting. But it may also have served as a marketplace and a place of refuge in times of war.

Bus tours of Stone Age and Bronze Age sites are already coming through Goseck, which is only 25 kilometres from the German town of Nebra, where an extraordinary bronze-and-gold map of the heavens dating from 3,600 years ago was discovered in 1999.

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