Inside 6,000-year-old burial mounds: mysterious "stone bodies" revealed
Without digging a single centimeter: innovative technology has revealed giant human-shaped stones in the depths of ancient burial mounds in the Brittany region. Now, all that separates science from final answers is a special excavation permit.
Large stone structures hidden for thousands of years inside two ancient burial mounds in France have been discovered using underground scanning, reigniting the question of what the burial rites of the region's inhabitants looked like about 6,000 years ago. Researchers estimate that the structures may include human-shaped granite stones, but emphasize that at this stage this is only a hypothesis, and only an archaeological excavation will be able to confirm their purpose.
The findings were discovered at the Coëby megalithic cemetery near Trédion, in the Brittany region of France, a site where dozens of stone structures from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age are located. Researchers identified within two elongated burial mounds, known as TRED30 and TRED31, areas with high electrical resistance in the soil — a sign that may indicate the presence of large stone blocks beneath the surface.
The study was published in the scientific journal Archaeological Prospection by a French-Breton team led by Philippe Gouezin from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Rennes 1, and Viviane Mathé from CNRS and the University of La Rochelle.
The scans indicate that significant underground structures exist in the center of both mounds. In the TRED30 mound, signs of stone were found at a greater depth, while in TRED31 they are closer to the surface. The researchers noted that a granite fragment exposed as a result of erosion along the axis of one of the mounds strengthens the assessment that these are indeed stone structures.
However, the researchers warn that the images obtained from the measurements do not allow for a definitive determination of the shape of the structures or their function:
"It is possible that these are human-like stones, stone-lined chambers, or other ritual structures, but this can only be clarified through excavation."
The researchers chose not to carry out extensive excavations at this stage because the site is protected and considered sensitive. Instead, they used a non-invasive method of electrical resistivity mapping of the soil — a technique that allows for the identification of differences between areas rich in stone and areas where the soil consists mainly of earth.
The Coëby cemetery, discovered in 1986 in the Landes de Lanvaux granite massif area, includes about 95 megalithic structures from different periods. Some of the mounds at the site reach up to 80 meters in length and about 1.8 meters in height. The findings resemble other burial traditions along the coast of France, including the Passy burial sites, which date back to the mid-fifth millennium BCE.
