by Chris Fowler
All of these chambered tombs were constructed in the early Neolithic, probably in the few centuries around and after 3800 BC, and many continued to be used for considerable periods of time, in some cases into the late Neolithic, such as West Kennet in Wiltshire. Others were ‘reused’ (i.e. they saw subsequent material culture additions) in the early Bronze Age, although it seems likely that these sites simply continued to be key locations over long periods of time. This causes problems in ascertaining precise construction dates, so in many areas we only have a rather general idea of when sites were constructed and used. We do know, however, that the middle Neolithic (c. 3400–2900 BC) saw the renewed construction of chambered tombs known as passage graves, primarily in Ireland but with a few sites on Orkney and two on Anglesey in north Wales. These large passage graves are notably different from the early sites. First, there are only very limited numbers in very specific areas of Ireland and Britain. Secondly, they have much larger and more impressive chamber areas which are also set further into the cairn or mound and therefore have a much longer passage between the chamber and the exterior. The most spectacular examples are found in the Boyne valley, with Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth (Eogan 1986). In Ireland middle Neolithic passage graves are also found in ‘cemeteries’ alongside one another and early Neolithic tombs. Further unique elements of passage graves are their frequent association with rock art motifs, which adorn the outer kerbstones and stones in the passage and chamber (Shee Twohig 1981), and the associated material culture. The Boyne valley monuments have large carved stone basins in the chambers, which had been used to hold deposits. At Knowth, a remarkable carved stone macehead was also found.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Cultural interaction and the question of origins
Determining the age of chambered tombs continues to prove an intractable and sometimes controversial issue. Nineteenth-century writers, such as the Baron de Bonstetten (1865) and James Fergusson (1872), assumed they had a common origin, and that their distribution through western and northern Europe was the result of cultural diffusion attributed to the travels of a ‘megalithic’ people. The diffusionist interpretation remained dominant until the 1960s when radiocarbon dates provoked new modes of interpretation. Among these was the argument that the tombs had independent origins in separate regions (Ireland, Scandinavia, Brittany, Portugal) through a process of parallel social change associated with the adoption of agriculture (Renfrew 1976). That view is no longer widely held and west European chambered tombs are today generally agreed to be linked by some degree of inter-regional interaction. Their precise chronology remains difficult to establish.
The structures themselves cannot usually be directly dated, although advances in luminescence dating of granite surfaces offer future potential provided the precision and reliability of the method can be refined (Vafiadou et al. 2007). Direct AMS dating has also been possible in exceptional circumstances, for example in Denmark where rolls of birch bark were inserted between the courses of dry stonework (Dehn and Hansen 2006b). In north-west Iberia, dates have been obtained for charcoal incorporated in the black painted motifs, but painted decoration was sometimes added several centuries after tomb construction (see earlier in the chapter; Steelman et al. 2005). The great majority of radiometric dates for chambered tombs come not from the structures themselves but from materials buried within or beneath them. In regions of limestone and chalk with alkaline soils, bone preservation is generally good and human remains in the tomb chambers can be dated directly. Recent studies employing large numbers of AMS radiocarbon dates on human skeletal material coupled with the careful examination of context and Bayesian statistical analysis have provided reliable and highly detailed chronologies for a number of chambered long mounds in southern Britain and similar chronologies have been proposed in the context of some north German tombs (Bayliss and Whittle 2007; Mischka 2011).
Many of the most famous chambered tombs are found in regions (such as Brittany or the Portuguese Alentejo) where acid soils predominate and human skeletal material is less frequently preserved. An outline framework is nonetheless available for most areas, but especially in these regions the traditional typological chronologies, based on tomb form or contents (notably pottery), remain dominant. Such typological schemes may successfully indicate relative sequences, but provide little indication of the rate and rhythm of change. The most striking feature of the detailed AMS sequences from southern Britain and south Scandinavia is the clustering of dates, suggesting that entire classes of chambered tomb might have been built in short spans of two or three centuries (Bayliss and Whittle 2007; Persson and Sjögren 1995). This stop-start pattern of tomb construction might equally apply to less precisely dated regions such as Brittany (Scarre 2001).
Evidence for long-distance contacts—seen through the dispersal of domesticated resources, raw materials, and finished artefacts—suggests that past models of indigenous local developments (Renfrew 1976) need to be balanced against inter-regional contacts resulting in shared cosmologies across vast swathes of north-western Europe. Irrespective of the regional variety of early tombs, the long mound, in its multiple expressions, was an important idea and such monuments often stand at the head of regional sequences; at the same time, it is clear many developed through successive extensions and aggrandisements. They were clearly burial monuments, as attested by the presence of human remains found within the timber-built and, along the Atlantic façade, stone-built chambers. However, they also embodied commemorative concepts that linked them with the ancestral past: some communities chose to emphasize the ancestral value of the Danubian longhouses in the external appearance of the mounds and, in some instances, veritable longbarrow cemeteries replicated the abandoned villages themselves (Laporte and Tinévez 2004; Midgley 2005). This commemorative significance of the long mounds was the first stage in the process of evolution of Neolithic world views in which the megaliths played a fundamental role. Over time the accessibility of chamber interiors became important, and this was accompanied by a profound change in the treatment of the dead and by a range of new ritual activities performed near the tombs. In architectural terms this was accomplished by the construction of dolmens and passage graves, frequently entered through long passages. Whilst chamber interiors never accommodated significant numbers of participants, their entrances, aggrandized with extensions, façades, and deep forecourts, created foci for ceremonial activities outside the tombs.
The materiality of megalithic architecture: labour, materials, symbolism
Archaeologists studying chambered tombs often spend considerable time thinking about their final form. However, it is important to consider their life histories, in particular the effects the construction of a monument would have had on a community. Colin Richards (2004) and Lesley McFadyen (2006) have recently discussed these important issues in relation to the construction processes of chambered tombs in Britain. Considerable planning and effort was required before communities could even begin to construct a monument, which involved preparing components such as ropes and rollers, as well as selecting a suitable site (Cummings 2007; Richards 2004). Stones would need to be dragged across the landscape, and people carefully wove different material substances from different parts of the landscape into the fabric of the monument (McFadyen 2006), perhaps representative of separate communities, events, or places.
Megalithic monuments were not simply made of stone: a complex array of materials was used selectively in their construction. Throughout the Neolithic there was an interesting interplay between timber and stone architecture. It involved, for example, a transition from burial monuments with timber elements—wooden chambers and massive timber façades—into those whose principal features were built in stone. On the one hand, this change may have been related to a practical aspect of land clearance, providing areas suitable for agriculture by cutting down the forests and removing large stones. In northern Europe in the early fourth millennium BC timber was largely abandoned in favour of the more
durable stone in funerary monuments, but it continued to be employed, on a massive scale, at other ceremonial sites. Thus, at the causewayed enclosure of Sarup on Fyn, massive timber palisades were erected, for which thousands of oaks had to be cut down (Andersen 1997). The differences in the temporal qualities of stone and timber must have been important—offering suitable metaphors for distinguishing between the realms of the living and the dead—and those who built the longbarrows, megaliths, and enclosures would have held views on the desirability, appropriateness, and symbolism of the materials they used.
The megalith builders consciously employed certain raw materials for the symbolic significance of their colours and textures. Red boulders in the façades of some dolmens and passage graves, for example at Grønjægers Høj on Møn, at Nobbin on Rügen, or at Kong Svends Høj on Lolland, were chosen to create dramatic effects at certain times of day—at sunrise or sunset—and to provide theatrical settings for public ceremonies (Midgley 2008). Similar effects may have been desired outside Newgrange, in Ireland, where vast quantities of quartz were present, or at Cairnholy I and II in Scotland, where the façade orthostats display dramatically different textures. Variations in shape, texture, and colouring of the stones in the stone rows of Brittany speak of deliberate positioning, permitting the manipulation of perspective and other visual effects. Exotic quartzite boulders, such as that at Grønjægers Høj, and other deliberately massive capstones, whose shapes and textures created particular visual effects, may well have protruded over the protective chamber mounds. Indeed, the igneous rock capstones covering the passage grave chambers of an extraordinary concentration of megaliths on the Falbygden plateau, Västergötland, probably also protruded over their low, two-tier mounds (Sjögren 2003).
There has also been considerable discussion in recent years relating to the experiences these sites created for people, especially in terms of what it would have been like for someone to enter a chambered tomb in prehistory. Some chambered tombs in north-west Europe were too small ever to have accommodated large numbers of people. However, there are many examples from across this area where the chambers are large enough to accommodate a number of people along with artefacts. People clearly entered the chambers to deposit and reorder material. Inside the dark north European chambers, powerful effects could have been created by a few flickering torches, dramatically lighting layers of birch bark within the walls and the burnt white flint covering the floor upon which the ancestral bones rested. Elsewhere, for example at Newgrange or at Gavrinis, the rays of a rising midwinter sun entering the chambers highlighted decorative motifs carved deeply into the stones, perhaps enabling a few members of the community to reaffirm their myths of origin and to experience the mysteries of the surrounding world. Some chambered tombs may also have been deliberately engineered to have certain acoustic properties (Watson 2001). It has been shown that particular acoustic effects can be created through quite simple means. For example, a simple drum beat in some passage graves has an acoustic effect similar to that of blowing over the top of a bottle (Watson and Keating 1999). This would have created powerful effects on those in the chamber, effects they may well have assigned to supernatural forces. In combination with other components, including distinctive rock art designs, or the careful placement of colours and textures (Cummings 2002), these effects meant that chambered tombs may well have been thought of as other-worldly places, places where the living and dead met, and as gateways to other worlds. In this sense, then, chambered tombs were not simply locations for depositing and transforming the dead, but places between the worlds of the living and the dead, creating extraordinary experiences for people engaging with them.
Megalithic builders were thus employing raw materials as a medium through which they could symbolize, in quite dramatic fashion, their myths and the powers of the supernatural. This was skilled crafting at its best, combining the technological expertise and the symbolic knowledge needed for the megaliths to function within the cosmological order of the Neolithic world.
Megalithic art
The presence of carved motifs on megalithic monuments has been recognized since the end of the seventeenth century, but the term ‘megalithic art’ only became common during the early twentieth century. Megalithic art is present throughout much of the area where megalithic chambered tombs are found. It is not restricted to chambered tombs but also occurs on standing stones, and the range of motifs overlaps with those at rock art sites in Britain, Ireland, and western Iberia (see Fairén-Jiménez, this volume; Jones et al., this volume). In quantitative terms the highest concentration of megalithic art is located in the Boyne Valley of Ireland, where Knowth has over 300 decorated stones (Eogan 1986) and its neighbour Newgrange has no fewer than 85 decorated slabs (Shee Twohig 1981, 100). At Knowth and Newgrange carvings are not restricted to the tomb interiors but are a particular feature of the megalithic kerbstones that edge the mounds. The motifs include concentric circles, radial motifs, nested arcs, chevrons, lozenges, and spirals. Similar motifs are found on a small number of passage graves in north Wales and at a handful of sites in Orkney, which may indicate direct connections with the Boyne area.
The megalithic art of Britain and Ireland belongs probably to the later fourth millennium BC and is essentially non-representative in character. It contrasts with the earlier tradition of carvings on Breton megalithic monuments that includes depictions of hafted stone axes and quadrupeds. Also present in Brittany is a range of more enigmatic motifs which may be representational but are hard to identify. One such motif, traditionally considered a female being or divinity, has been recently reinterpreted (controversially) as male genitals, whilst another (formerly termed an ‘axe-plough’) may represent a sperm whale (Cassen 2000; Whittle 2000). Interpretation of these motifs has been revised in light of the evidence that many of the carved stones found within chambered tombs were recycled standing stones. Fallen standing stones bearing the same range of motifs are known (L’Helgouach 1983, 1997). The decorated menhirs (some of them also shaped into ‘shouldered’ anthropomorphic forms) are among the earliest Neolithic monuments in north-west France (fifth millennium BC) and appear to have been associated with long mounds. Recycled decorated stones have also been identified at Knowth and Newgrange, though other slabs in the Boyne tombs seem to have been carved in situ.
Megalithic art is also found in Iberia, where again it is present both on standing stones and within chambered tombs (sometimes on slabs recycled from earlier monuments). Alongside carved motifs, Iberian megalithic art also features painted designs, notably in Galicia and northern Portugal, although recent discoveries indicate that painted art was once present throughout the peninsula (Bueno-Ramírez and Balbín-Behrmann 2002). Painted decoration was recently found in Brittany, and faint incisions interpreted as guidelines for painted motifs have also been found as far afield as Orkney, indicating that painted art may once have been considerably more widespread (Bradley et al. 2001). The megalithic art of Iberia is mainly non-representational although ‘sun’ symbols, ‘whale’ motifs, serpents, quadrupeds, and anthropomorphs are found.
The diversity of styles and subjects, and the use of recycled materials, warns against any single explanation or interpretation for megalithic art, although a connection has been suggested between some motifs and the abstract shapes seen in trance (Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1993; Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005; Dronfield 1996). Other features, such as the paired female breasts in some of the later north French tombs (fourth millennium BC), may indicate beliefs of nurturing the dead whose remains lay within (Scarre 2009). In most cases, however, the significance of the art and its relationship to funerary activity and symbolism remains unclear. Proposals that the motifs found in a few of the later tombs of southern Brittany might represent human torsos are speculative and have not won widespread acceptance (Thomas and Tilley 1993).
Interring the dead and other activities at tombs
Whilst the preservation of human remains in north-west European megalit
hs is uneven, the chambers were clearly constructed to contain burials. In addition a range of other activities took place in the immediate vicinity of the monuments, emphasizing their role in the wider social realm of the Neolithic communities.
Natural conditions, for example the largely acidic soils in Brittany, across the North European Plain or parts of southern Scandinavia, are clearly responsible for the poor survival of human remains in those areas. In contrast, in areas with underlying geology of chalk and limestone, such as Normandy, Poitou-Charente, southern Britain, or the Falbygden plateau in west central Sweden, human remains survive well. Such remarkable preservation enables detailed study of the various burial practices and, importantly, provides a unique insight into the lives and deaths of people in the Neolithic. Considerable osteological and interpretative work has been conducted on human remains (see Fowler and Scarre, this volume) and current scientific analyses on human skeletons from burial chambers in different regions of north-west Europe are opening up further possibilities of family and kin group analyses and mobility patterns within Neolithic communities (Sjögren, this volume), as well as suggesting interpretations for the selection of individuals to be buried within monuments (Thomas et al. 2011).