scholarly journals Chris Scarre and Luiz Oosterbeek, Megalithic Tombs in Western Iberia: Excavations at the Anta da Lajinha

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Silva
Keyword(s):  
Megalithic Tombs

Chris Scarre and Luiz Oosterbeek, Megalithic Tombs in Western Iberia: Excavations at the Anta da Lajinha Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2020. Hardback, 242 pp. ISBN 978-1-78570-980-7. £45.00.

The Orientations of Megalithic Tombs of Eastern Catalunya: Addendum

1999 ◽  
Vol 30 (24) ◽  
pp. S89-S90
Author(s):  
Michael Hoskin ◽  
Toni Palomo I Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Megalithic Tombs

Past records, new views: Carnac 1830–2000

Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (291) ◽  
pp. 218-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Roughley ◽  
Andrew Sherratt ◽  
Colin Shell
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Megalithic Tombs

The megalithic monuments of Carnac, Brittany, in the Département of the Morbihan, are amongst the most farnous in France. indeed in the world. This region has not only the densest conccntration of such sites in Europe but also retained its importance as a centre of monument-building from the late 5th to the :jrd millennium FK:, giving it a unique significance in the study of Neolithic landscapes (Sherratt 1990; 1998). Its menhirs, stone alignments, and megalithic tombs have attracted the attention of scholars since the 18th century, and there is thus an unusually full record, both written and pictorial, of the nature of these monuments as they were perceived over 300 years.

The Origin of Neolithic Culture in Northern Europe

Antiquity ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 23 (91) ◽  
pp. 129-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. G. Childe
Keyword(s):  
Northern Europe ◽  
Southern Sweden ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Neolithic Culture ◽  
Northwest Germany ◽  
Shell Mounds ◽  
Expansive Group ◽  
Megalithic Tombs

Till 1948 the coherent record of farming in Northern Europe began with the neolithic culture represented in the Danish dysser (‘dolmens’) and most readily defined by the funnel-necked beakers, collared flasks and ‘amphorae’ found therein. As early as 1910 Gustav Kossinna had remarked that these distinctive ceramic types, and accordingly the culture they defined, were not confined to the West Baltic coastlands, but recurred in the valleys of the Upper Vistula and Oder to the east, to the south as far as the Upper Elbe and in northwest Germany and Holland too. He saw in this distribution evidence for the first expansion of Urindogermanen from their cradle in the Cimbrian peninsula. In the sequel Åberg filled in the documentation of this expansion with fresh spots on the distribution map and Kossinna himself distinguished typologically four main provinces or geographical groups—the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western. Finally Jazdrzewski gave a standard account of the whole content of what had come to be called Kultura puharów lejkowatych, Trichterbecherkultur, or Tragtbaegerkulturen. As ‘Funnel-necked-beaker culture’ is a clumsy expression and English terminology is already overloaded with ‘beakers’, I shall use the term ‘First Northern’.The orgin of this vigorous and expansive group of cultivators and herdsmen has always been an enigma. Not even Kossinna imagined that the savages of the Ertebølle shell-mounds spontaneously began cultivating cereals and breeding sheep in Denmark. As dysser were regarded as megalithic tombs and as megaliths are Atlantic phenomena, he supposed that the bases of the neolithic economy were introduced from the West together with the ‘megalithic idea’. But the First Northern Farmers of the South and East groups did not build megalithic tombs. Moreover, in the last ten years an extension of the North group across southern Sweden as far as Södermannland has come to light, and these farmers too, though they used collared flasks and funnel-necked beakers, built no dolmens either. In any case there was nothing Western about the pottery from the Danish dysser, and Western types of arrow-head are conspicuously rare in Denmark.

Enduring Past: Megalithic Tombs of Brittany and the Roman Occupation in Western France

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara Vejby
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Initial Phase ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Major Road ◽  
North West ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
Megalithic Tombs ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Loire River

The extended lives of prehistoric monuments, whether or not they were interacted with once their initial phase of use had ended and how they were treated, can reveal valuable details about a culture. To interact with a place means that the action or influence is reciprocal. The individual, or group of individuals, is somehow affected by the physical contact they’ve had with the site, and the place in turn has been altered. Interactions are more than just reuse of a space. In fact, missing pieces of monuments’ biographies, evidence of subsequent use and treatment, are details that may tell us how a people dealt with their own past as well as that of others. The focus of this study is a region in which the biographies of a group of monuments appear to be intimately tied to clashing cultures during the Roman occupation: Morbihan, Brittany. Brittany is the westernmost province of France, roughly 30 kilometres north-west of the mouth of the Loire river, and extending over 200 kilometres westward into the Celtic Sea. The south-easternmost department of this province is Morbihan, which makes up over 6,800 square kilometres and centres on the Gulf of Morbihan, a few kilometres south of Vannes (Darioritum), the Roman-period civitas-capital of the Veneti. Darioritum was not only a port for commercial ships, but was also on the major road network connecting the Coriosolitae (Corseul), Osismes (Carhaix-Plouguer) and Namnetes (Nantes) civitates (Galliou and Jones 1991, 77, 81, 84). Evidence found in a thorough survey of Iron Age and Roman materials at megalithic tombs in Atlantic Europe revealed that Brittany is by far the region with the highest concentration of direct Roman period interactions, despite both the distribution of megalithic tombs across the peninsula and subsequent habitation patterns during the Iron Age and Roman periods (Scarre 2011, 29–33; Vejby 2012) . It also revealed that this activity is a major shift from the comparatively low number of megalithic tombs at which Iron Age materials have been found.

The Chronology of the French Collective Tombs

1958 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glyn Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Main Axis ◽  
Gulf Of Lions ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Original Essay ◽  
Megalithic Tombs ◽  
Qualitative Picture

The surveys of the megalithic tombs of France made by Bertrand (1864; 1875), the Sous-Commission des Monuments mégalithiques, Adrien de Mortillet (1901), and Joseph Déchelette enabled maps to be made which showed the essential features of the distribution in space of the thousands of prehistoric collective tombs in France. Déchelette listed a total of 4457 dolmens and allées couvertes: fresh regional surveys and fieldwork in the fifty years that have elapsed since the publication of the first volume of his Manuel d'archéologie préhistorique, celtique et gallo-romaine in 1908 have increased this figure to between five and a half and six thousand tombs. This quantitative increase, however, has in no way altered the qualitative picture of the distribution in space of the megalithic tombs in France, implicit in Bertrand's original essay, and explicit in the analyses of Déchelette and Adrien de Mortillet.Bertrand had emphasized that the ‘dolmens’ of France occurred mainly west of a line from Marseilles to Brussels; Adrien de Mortillet's map stressed the main axis of distribution, namely from Brittany to the Gulf of Lions, and the very large numbers of megalithic tombs that exist in the six departments of the Ardèche, Lozère, Aveyron, Gard, Hérault and Lot.

Megalithic Answers

Antiquity ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 44 (176) ◽  
pp. 260-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glyn Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Megalithic Tombs

The writers of this important and interesting symposium did not set out to answer all the questions that they ask, and this was wise and modest. They wanted to think afresh themselves about old problems-problems of the inter-relationships and origins of British megalithic tombs that have been discussed for over a hundred years-in the light of new knowledge, and to make all other megalithic enquirers do the same. In this they have succeeded: this stimulating and thoughtprovoking book must be read by all concerned with the prehistory of western Europe in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

Transhumance and megalithic tombs in Iberia

Antiquity ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 53 (208) ◽  
pp. 150-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Megalithic Tombs

The invasion hypothesis in Irish prehistory

Antiquity ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 52 (205) ◽  
pp. 121-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
General Picture ◽  
Ellis Island ◽  
Megalithic Tombs ◽  
Mesolithic Period

A glance at the archaeological literature of the last dozen years demonstrates all too clearly that the popularity of the 'invasion hypothesis' in Irish archaeology is quite undiminished. An almost incessant stream of immigrants appears to have tramped ashore from the Mesolithic period to the Iron Age. Even reckoning those pre-eminent invaders, the Beaker Folk, as merely a single influx, over a dozen significant prehistoric population movements are claimed by a variety of writers. The general picture presented suggests that Ireland throughout much of her prehistory was, if not an archaeological Ellis Island, at least a desirable landfall for the land-hungry, the dispossessed and the adventurous of most of the rest of Western Europe. Major changes and innovations in the archaeological record-in monument or artifact typemay conceivably be the result of either independent invention, or diffusion or of a combination of the two. The occurrence of megalithic tombs in very different cultural and chronological contexts in Western Europe, India and Japan, for example, is an instance of independent invention.

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