Buried about a foot or so down in the soil lay the carefully sorted remains of sixteen children and adults. They had lain there in the darkness since the Stone Age, surrounded by the most beautiful objects of their time in flint, bone and ceramics ar ...
Buried about a foot or so down in the soil lay the carefully sorted remains of sixteen children and adults. They had lain there in the darkness since the Stone Age, surrounded by the most beautiful objects of their time in flint, bone and ceramics around the ruins of a wooden temple as ancient as the pyramids of Egypt.
The archaeologists who started excavating in Turinge, south of Stockholm, were totally unaware of this, and nor would the dead have known what was waiting for them. It was a world of seal hunters, burn-beat cultivators, ice fishermen, god worshippers, tribes and small settlements, artful stonework, red-marked rock carvings, child mortality, human sacrifices, scalping, brutal battles, sea journeys to foreign shores, complicated rituals and budding small kingdoms.
The temple of the dead is a detective story from reality where we get to follow the mysterious message that lay hidden in the soil. While trying to break the code of the temple of the dead, the archaeologists felt they were on the trail of the deepest secret of Stone Age man – a secret of cosmic dimensions.
Archaeologist and author Jonathan Lindström led the excavations of the temple in Turinge. It turned out to be a wonderful scientific adventure, an improvised struggle against time and chance, but also a gate to the underground and the key to the world of the younger Stone Age.