Grooves (archaeology)

There are grooves (Swedish: sliprännor, slipskåror. Sw-En translation: sharpening grooves) carved into rock in many places in Europe, and some of them appear on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland. They are common in France, where they were used to polish stone axes.

In Sweden, there are also grooves in north-western Scania and Halland. In Gantofta located 14 km (8.7 mi) south of Helsingborg a face of sandstone rock is engraved with thousands of grooves. Local tradition says they were made as whetstones.

Grooves in France date from the Neolithic and are called polissoirs. Those in l’Aube date from c. 2500 to 2000 BCE. People who built dolmens, erected menhirs and made grooves supported an archaeological culture known as Seine-Oise-Marne. The l’Aube district had more than 130 monuments from this period including 49 grooves before 1927. Today there are only 34 including 16 grooves. Many stones were cut into roadstones or building blocks for homes.

Grooves have also been found in Tavastia in Finland and in Luxembourg, as well as at Fyfield Down in England.

Neolithic Grooves have been found in Tamil Nadu, India.

3,600 grooves have been discovered on Gotland, of which 700 are in limestone outcrops, while the remainder are on c. 800 boulders and slabs. The grooves are 50–100 cm (20–39 in) long, c. 10 cm (3.9 in) deep and c. 10 cm (3.9 in)wide.

The grooves began to attract scholarly attention in the 1850s. At first they were called "sharpening stones", but later they received the name "sword sharpening stones". After some time, newspapers and scholarly publications began to dispute this, since the shape of the grooves makes them unfit for sharpening swords. Another reason was that by 1933, more than 500 sites with grooves had been identified on Gotland. They were evenly distributed across the island. It was also noted that they ran in different directions and often crossed each other.

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Wikipedia