The wheel and axle of the Ljubljana Marshes
Before the wheel and axle, heavy loads on land moved on backs, sledges or rollers; after them, carts drawn by animals could carry them, and the wheel became a part of almost every machine that followed.
- Dated
- Place
- Stare gmajne, near Vrhnika, Ljubljana Marshes (Ljubljansko barje), Slovenia · Copper Age pile dwellers of the Ljubljana Marshes
- Coordinates
- 45° 58′ N · 14° 20′ E (approximate)
- Remains
- Fragmentary
Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsCC-BY-SA-4.0Original record
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From the archivist
It was lying at the bottom of a ditch, in the black water of a marsh south of Ljubljana, where a machine had already broken one of its edges without knowing what it was.
About five thousand years ago, villages stood here on piles above the shore of a lake. Their people travelled mostly by water, in boats hollowed from single trunks. But someone among them made something else. From an old ash tree he or she cut two broad planks, fitted them together with oak dowels, shaped them into a disc and cut a square hole in its centre. Into that hole went the end of a long oak axle, wedged tight, so that wheel and axle turned as one beneath a small cart.
The work is careful. The maker knew how ash bends and how oak holds, and how wood swells when wet.
The marsh kept it because nothing could reach it there, neither air nor rot. The oldest wooden wheel known to this archive is not a sculpture or a symbol. It is a tool, made to be used.
Established
- In 2002 archaeologists of the Institute of Archaeology ZRC SAZU, sampling wood in a drainage ditch at the pile dwelling of Stare gmajne near Vrhnika, found a wooden wheel at the bottom of the ditch, partly damaged by earlier machine digging; its detached axle was found when the ditch was widened (Šinkovec 2014; Velušček 2002).
- The wheel, 72 cm across and about 5 cm thick, is made of two ash planks held together by four oak dowels, with a rectangular hole at its centre; the ash tree it came from was at least 40 cm thick and about 80 years old (Šinkovec 2014; Velušček et al. 2009).
- The axle is a single piece of oak 124 cm long, square at its ends and fixed to the wheel with oak wedges, so that wheel and axle turned together; they belonged to a two wheeled cart (Šinkovec 2014).
- Tree ring analysis, radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy place the wheel in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE, about 5,200 years ago, contemporary with the settlement (Šinkovec 2014; MGML).
- It was shown to the public for the first time in the exhibition The Wheel: 5,200 years at the City Museum of Ljubljana, from May 2013 to April 2014 (MGML).
Interpretation
It is the oldest wooden wheel with an axle yet found, but not proof that the wheel was invented here. Images and models of wheeled vehicles appear at about the same time from Mesopotamia to the steppes and central Europe, and scholars still debate whether the wheel spread from a single centre or was invented several times; the potter's wheel of Mesopotamia may be older still. The published age is given as about 5,150 or 5,200 years, depending on the source.
In 10,000 years
In 10,000 years, will a single wheel pulled from the mud be enough to show how we moved across the Earth?
Sources (4)
- Velušček, A., Čufar, K., Zupančič, M. Prehistoric wooden wheel with an axle from the pile-dwelling Stare gmajne at the Ljubljansko barje. In Velušček, A. (ed.), Stare gmajne pile-dwelling settlement and its era: the Ljubljansko barje in the 2nd half of the 4th millennium BC. Opera Instituti Archaeologici Sloveniae 16. Ljubljana, Založba ZRC, 2009, p. 197-222.
- Velušček, A. The remains of an Eneolithic cart from the Ljubljana Marshes (Ostanki eneolitskega voza z Ljubljanskega barja). Arheološki vestnik 53, 2002, p. 51-57.
- Šinkovec, I. The wheel with an axle from the pile dwelling Stare gmajne near Vrhnika (around 3,200 BC). In Habjanič, O. (ed.), The Practical Value of the Wooden Wheel. Maribor, Regional Museum Maribor, 2014. · museum-mb.si
- Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana (MGML). The Wheel: 5,200 years, exhibition, City Museum of Ljubljana, 2013 to 2014. · mgml.si
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