Here Comes the Sun

Features September/October 2025

On a small Danish island 5,000 years ago, farmers crafted tokens to bring the sun out of the shadows
Courtesy the National Museum of Denmark
SHARE:

It had been getting colder and darker for the last few months, and the small community on the Danish island of Bornholm didn’t know what to think. Their ancestors had arrived more than a millennium before, in about 4000 b.c., and there had always been an abundant supply of domesticated grains and livestock, as well as wild plants, fish, and game. Recently, people had noticed that wild plants weren’t as robust as they once had been and that crops had begun to fail. During the next year, life

Become a Digital Subscriber Today

Get full access to all content on the ARCHAEOLOGY website and our PDF archive going back to the first publication in March 1948.

Already a Subscriber? Sign In

  • Features September/October 2025

    Spirit Cave Connection

    The world’s oldest mummified person is the ancestor of Nevada’s Northern Paiute people

    Read Article
    Howard Goldbaum/allaroundnevada.com
  • Features September/October 2025

    Myth of the Golden Dragon

    Eclectic artifacts from tombs in northeastern China tell the story of a little-known dynasty

    Read Article
    Photograph courtesy Liaoning Provincial Museum, Liaoning Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and Chaoyang County Museum
  • Features September/October 2025

    Remote Sanctuary at the Crossroads of Empire

    Ancient Bactrians invented distinct ways to worship their gods 2,300 years ago in Tajikistan

    Read Article
    Excavations of the sanctuary in the village of Torbulok in southern
    Gunvor Lindström/Excavations supported by the German Research Foundation
  • Letter from Greece September/October 2025

    Searching for Washingtonia

    How archaeologists located a forgotten nineteenth-century utopian community

    Read Article
    View looking northeast along the Isthmus of Corinth, Greece
    Albert Sarvis