A Strange Iron Age Ritual

Interesting find on top of a rocky hill in northern Germany: The hill, known as Feldstein, if made of porphyry shot through with veins of quartz. Last year a metal detectorist found two iron axes lying in a cleft in the rock. Beneath them was a hollow that had been cut into the rock, then filled.

The analysis of these materials has allowed specialists to reconstruct the sequence of actions that took place at that point more than two millennia ago, sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. According to Dr. Zeiler, the sequence began with the opening of a small cavity in the rock to extract the quartz embedded within it, a task that required considerable effort given the hardness of the material and the exposure of the location to harsh weather conditions.

Once the quartz had been obtained, it was processed immediately on the stone slab itself, using the crusher to reduce it to fragments only a few millimeters in diameter. Once this operation was completed, the cavity was refilled with the crushed quartz and with the very tools used in the process, that is, the slab and the crusher. Finally, on the leveled surface of the sealed pit, the two iron axes were deposited in the arrangement that the detectorist was able to observe millennia later.

But wht does it mean? Is the quartz being interpreted as some kind of magical substanced? By extracting and crushing it, did the performer of the rite hope to release and use its power? Were the quartz veins, maybe, the blood of the earth? So that the earth's power is being invoked?

Honestly this is one of the weirder rites I have come across in my career.