In Our Time - Megaliths

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent. Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious. With Vicki Cummings Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central LancashireJulian Thomas Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester and Susan Greaney Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in many parts of the world, it's possible to see huge stones that have been placed in the landscape. Often, they're visually striking and highly prominent. They're called megaliths, and such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period. The oldest ones are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn large amounts about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.

We meet to discuss megalists are Vicki Cummings, Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire. Julian Thomas, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester, and Susan Greeney, lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter. Susan Greeney, how do we define what a megalith is? Well, the word megalith is formed of two parts from the ancient Greek, mega, huge, and lithe from lithos stone. So they're just large stones. And the term gets applied to a whole range of different monuments, mostly in Europe, dating from prehistory.

But anything, really, that's been built out of very, very large stones can be termed a megalith. When you say mostly in Europe, you're implying that they're all around the world, are they? That's right. They're found in many different parts of the world. And although they're prehistoric generally in Europe across the world, in fact, in some places they're still being built today. Can you briefly give us some idea of the different stone monuments there are? In Britain there are a number of different types of monument that get built, which we call megaliths. There are enclosed tombs, chambers of various types, passage tombs, long barrows with large stone chambers.

Long barrows, you mean those humps that you see? Yeah, that's right. The long barrows with the stone chambers in particular would come under the term megalith. And we also get enclosures of different sizes and shapes, so sort of three standards. stones, stone circles, standing stones just by themselves or in rows, sometimes in avenues, and a whole range of different types. A lot of them seem to be burial monuments, but many of them are not related to funerary activity. And let's just take the British Isles, largely in the Western Ireland, of course. Are we talking about a lot of sites there? Yes. The distribution of megaliths in Britain, Ireland, is very much a Western and Northern

thing because of where stone outcrops and because where stones are available. I don't know I can put a number on it, but it must be in the thousands. I know there's about 35,000 in Europe alone. So there's a huge, huge number of these things. When did they start discovering them and deciding that they were worth looking at? Instead of being great lumps of stone lying, being covered with moss? The first records we have really medieval, particularly Stonehenge. It's Stonehenge that gets written about the earliest, really.

There are medieval manuscripts with images of Stonehenge, for example. It's not really until the 17th century, 16th century, that people start to then discover and write about other megalithic monuments. Avebury, for example, isn't really known about until it gets rediscovered by John Albury when he's on a hunting trip. Many of the studies really flourish in the Victorian period and later when people suddenly start to get interested in who built these monuments and when and start to ask the kind of questions that we're still trying to answer now.

When you say Aver was rediscovered, you know, talk about finding Tornhenge, do we find them in a way on the hill that we see them now, or have they been much built up since they were first in inverted commas found? They have changed quite a bit, and we have very good records of how they appeared 300 years ago also. People like William Stucley, for example, the antiquary were recording and drawing them, and we know that he was doing that at a time when quite a lot of them were being destroyed. So whether that was because people were breaking up the stones because they wanted the land for agriculture or because they thought they were pagan monuments, but certainly they are now very much ruins of what they would have been in the past.

Thank you. Julian and Julian Thomas, can you give us some, can you give us some idea of the age of these monuments? They're of very different ages. So in Europe, probably the earliest that we've got data, back to about 4,700 BC in the west of France, where you start to get the coming together of a whole series of ideas about burial and stone to create what eventually emerge as characteristic monuments like passage tombs. In Britain, 3,900, perhaps, shortly after the beginning of the Neolithic. But in other places, places very, very different. So in the Caucasus, many of the tombs are around about 3,000 BC. In some places, they're still building them today, so places like Madagascar and Indonesia. So can we go back to the Neolithic? Can you give us some idea of what's going on in that period? More importantly, what is important, why it's going on in that period. It's really quite important to recognize that it's not just a matter of megaliths starting at a

particular date and then continuing. They tend to very often occur in wave. of particular groups of monuments. And rather than just being an attribute of a particular kind of people, I think they're likely to be built preferentially at times when there's some kind of stress or dislocation

or enhanced competition going on. So at the beginning of the Neolithic, that's certainly a period when there's a lot of population movement. What date would you give us? Around about 4,000 BC in this country. So 6,000 years ago. Yeah, so 6,000 years ago,

shortly after that, we start to see lots of these monuments starting to be created. At the same time. I mean, so did it all begin at the same time? Was there a movement in monuments, as it were? In this country, they start out quite spotily, and then they increase. And obviously, these are stone monuments.

They're found principally down the western side of Britain. But that's a little bit of an artificial picture because there are complementary monuments made of earth and timber that are principally found down the eastern part of Britain. Good to bring in the timber. They're obviously much more easily destroyed, aren't they? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that aspect of their temporality of these monuments is very important

because timber monuments are going to rot away on a timescale that's comparable with human life, and sometimes they're deliberately burnt down as well. So the way in which these different kinds of monuments work with memory is quite different. Some work as mnemonics because they remain in the landscape. Others create a spectacle in their destruction, and therefore they find their way into oral testimony over time. Thank you. Fickey, let's just keep setting. Your last question really in this area.

Where are they mostly set in Britain and Ireland, and what does that tell you? So the vast majority of early Neolithic chamber tombs are found in the west and the north of Britain, and they're found right the way across Ireland. So they're built very commonly, and there are many, many thousand monuments across Ireland. Why is that? It just seems to be something that really articulated and meant a lot for those people, whatever was going on in those particular communities,

whatever building a monument meant to those people, they needed to do it again and again and across the landscape. But it's much more sporadic throughout Britain. So there are large areas of Britain where there are no megalithic monuments, even where there is stone available for people to actually construct them. The variety was briefly alluded to earlier in the programme. Can you give us some idea of a variety of different monuments

which would come in the capacity of megaliths? Yeah, so in the early Neolithic, we've got a whole variety of different types of chambered tomb. A chambered tomb is a monument that's built out of stone, and there is a chamber area that's created out of upright stones with a stone on top to create a sealed chamber, and then that's encased within either stone or earth. So the chamber itself would be encased or enclosed within a mound or a cairn.

One of the types of chambered tomb that we get, particularly in the Middle Neolithic, is something that we call a passage tomb or a passage grave. And there's smaller numbers of these, but where they are constructed, they're often absolutely spectacular, really, really large chambers, so you could fit many tens of people, if not hundreds of people, within the chamber.

The reason they're called passage graves is that they have a long, thin passage which runs from the chamber to the outside of the monument and once again they're encased within a large mound or cairn. And why did they encase them in that way? I think it's partly structural. You can't sort of have a free standing chamber

for the most part because it'll fall over but I think it's also about making them very visible to people within the wider landscape. Can you tell people what a dolman is? Well a dolman is a particular type of chambered tomb and they are classed as chambered tombs but they are one of these that often don't actually have any burials within them and the distinctive thing about them is that they are a chamber constructed out of stones but they have an absolutely massive capstone on the top which is much larger

than actually needed to encase the chamber and the largest example is at a site called browns hill in county carlo in britain and ireland and the capstone is 160.000. So it's absolutely enormous. And it's not needed to create essentially a box, a stone box for burial underneath. So it's something of a little bit of a different type of megalith. I think we could pause here for a second and say, how did they manage to, they built on the whole place where rock was available. But they'd certainly be carted from A to B or sometimes A to Z.

How did they do that? In the case of Dolmins, it seems that they were actually using glacial erratics. so stones that were already deposited in the landscape after the last ice age and all they're essentially doing is digging around that stone and elevating it in situ. So they're not having to drag it very far, they're building where the stone was actually found. And once they're built, do you have any information about how often they were used,

how they were used, how they figured in the landscape of people's daily life, for instance? There are some examples where there are burials within them. The vast majority of dolmens are found in Western Britain and in Ireland, and unfortunately in those places, for the most part, there's very poor bone preservation because the soil is acidic. But there is an example over in the west of Ireland, Paul Nebrone and County Clare, which was built on top of limestone paving, and there was excellent bone preservation,

and in actual fact they'd buried really quite a large number of people into the monument. What do you know of the burial practices of the time? In chambered tombs and long barrows, people were depositing the dead in a variety of different ways. Sometimes cremations, sometimes inhumations. And particularly with long barrows, it wasn't just that somebody got buried and then was never moved again. These were places where bones were circulating. People were entering these tombs and adding new burials and moving older burials around. Sometimes people were stacking up long bones and skulls in particular parts of the chambers

and sometimes arranging the burials by the age of the person or by their. gender. So it's a variety of things and we can't think of these as being kind of places that where people lay undisturbed after they were deposited. But these were places that people return to time and time again to interact with the bones, sometimes to remove them from the tombs altogether, sometimes to add new burials. And so these are places where the dead were very much part of living rituals and part of activities and ceremonies that were taking place. Was there any sense that they were preparing them for the next life, as in as you in tombs, for instance.

There isn't a huge amount of evidence for grave goods in the early Neolithic. We do get the odd things, some small stone beads, that kind of thing. But they seem to be perhaps more personal items rather than being equipped to go to the next world. That does change. In the later Neolithic, we get some cremations that have got very fine objects with them, for example, polished stone mace heads,

so perforated stone items that seem to have been symbols of status. For example, one of the cremations at Stonehenge is accompanied by one of these maceans, heads. But it's fairly rare that we get people buried with food and equipment and costume that we'd think that that would meant an afterlife. Were the people specially designed to look after burial, the equivalent of priests? That's an interesting idea. I suspect that there were specialists who were the ones who were allowed to go into some of these tombs and interact with the dead and perhaps observe things like solstice alignments. I think everybody didn't have access to the tomb in the same way. So yes, I suspect they were ritual specialists.

I mean, I think it's really important to point out that the vast majority of people in the Neolithic weren't buried at all in any of these monuments. So I think for the vast majority of people, they're probably being buried perhaps in rivers, perhaps they're being deposited in different places. So it does seem to be that only special people or particular sets of communities were being picked out for burial in places like chambered tombs. There are particular people, not necessarily the people who are important in the sense of status or power, but people who are understood as the beginning of genealogical lines very often. Thank you, Susan. Can you give us some examples of the connection between farmers and the megalis?

And these are on farming land, I presume. So what's going on there? Yes, there's traditionally been a very strong connection between megalithic monuments and the arrival of farming. In fact, the 4,000 BC date that we've been talking about at the beginning of the Neolithic is when people come to Britain with the first domestic crops and with the first domestic animals. Come from continental Europe,

both the kind of Iberian coast, Atlantic Coast, and also from the kind of low countries in France. And these people bring with them traditions of building monuments, which are then adapted and changed, but in effect implemented in Britain. And it's long been thought that people, to build monuments have to be farmers. They have to have had enough time

and surplus food in order to supply the workers or to provide material for the feasts and things that went with these monuments. And that's been a kind of long-held idea. But actually, we now know of a number of sites across the world where people are building relatively large monuments, megalithic monuments in some cases, who are not farmers. They are hunter-gatherers.

They are procuring their food by gathering wild resources. And so we have some sites, for example, in Jomon, Japan. So talking about kind of the Nihilithic period, but in Japan, the Jomon period, and also a site in modern-day Turcly called Gebekletepe, where they are just about on the cusp of developing farming, developing the first, using the first domestic crops, but they are also hunting, but they're building spectacular temples and sanding stones.

There's not a hard and fast link between farming and the building of megaliths. So getting to the matter, as it were, Julian, what are these people building these megaliths for? What do they intend them to do? a whole range of different things because these are so these are societies that clearly don't have the state

they don't have the same kinds of institutions that we have to maintain social order from one generation to a next they don't probably have fully instituted elites there's probably a certain amount of jockeying from position within these societies so on the one hand it's a way of increasing your profile within society

to be the person who's responsible for setting up or inspiring. You build the monument. Absolutely. Or you organise the people to build the monument and you have the feasting and you have the ritual activities that you're not on the side with.

Well, we certainly do get the remains of feasts in the forms of, particularly in Scandinavia, huge quantities of smashed pottery outside the tombs. In the four courts of other tombs, we get hearts, we get animal bones and so on. So there's

all sorts of social activity focused on these monuments and the building of the monuments, but also we've said that these are early agricultural societies. They're probably at very low population densities, and so bringing together dispersed populations at fixed places, I think is also very important, having a place where you know other people are going to be at particular times of year, being able to exchange gifts to acquire marriage partners, to acquire information. All of this is tremendously important.

So on the one hand, there's the aspect of increasing prestige and status, but on the other hand, there's social integration. So these monuments instead of just reflecting society, are part of the way in which society is built and articulated. How do we know that? Well, we don't. This is all very much inference, but that's archaeology. But you've got to infer from something.

Sure, and all of this, again, is down to the little, traces of information that we have from these sites. Seems strange these great big things all over the place for thousands of years and you keep telling us how little you know. Well, again, that is archaeology. Because we're dealing with societies that don't have written records.

And so it is all down to inference. And I think that's why, when you look at the way in which archaeologists have understood megalithic monuments down the centuries, you keep finding changes in the way in which we understand these. So it's almost as if megalists form a kind of barometer for archaeological thinking. And every time the ideas change, you see them in new light,

and you start to think about them in slightly different ways. So every hinge, every circle and so on, has its own, as it were, population, not resident, but coming for special events. Is that what you're saying? I think that's right. Does religion, any sort of religion play any sort of part in this? I'm sure it does. What is it? But I think we need to think rather differently about religion,

because, again, we're used to... the great world religions, the religions of the book, religions that have written scripture and that have a liturgy, it's very unlikely we have any of that going on. It's far more likely that religion is quite fluid and varies from one group to another, but because it's traditional or oral religion rather than written religion, I think it's very likely that you don't have a kind of a presiding deity. It's very likely that you don't have an idea of different realms.

like heaven or hell or an underworld. Instead, I think that it's likely that spirits, deities, ancestors are understood as being imminent in the landscape and that when people are actually constructing these monuments and reorganising the landscape, it's as if they're engineering the cosmology at the same time. Do they pray? I really don't know the answer to that.

I would think it's extremely likely that when you look at the way in which passage teams, for instance are organised and the way that they seem to resonate with sound that they're certainly chanting, I think there's a vocal element to all this What's the evidence for that?

Well, people have done audiological studies of the interiors of these monuments and found that they do seem to resonate with a low male voice which is kind of interesting. This wasn't the architect just whistling for keep his courage up. Well, that's entirely possible as well

because being inside these monuments is going to be quite an experience. Remember, there is very little in the way of architecture like these these monuments that people would have experienced before, and particularly with a passage grave, you're entering into a dark space that's covered over, you crawl down a low passage or crouch,

and then you open out into a big open area where you're encountering the remains of the dead. All of this, I think, is going to be an almost, overwhelming experience for people. Yes. Vicky, did you want to come here? It's important to remember that we're talking about megalists being built over about 1,500 years or so, and of course beliefs

will have changed in that period. And we know that people are, for example, treating their dead in very, very different ways at the beginning of the Neolithic to how they are at the end of the Neolithic. And they're building different types of monuments, they're building less enclosed spaces and more open stone circles and things like this. So

we can only assume that the religious beliefs changed. And for us, It's very difficult to get inside the minds of people who lived in that period. But we can only go on the evidence that we have. And for example, tombs, at least we can at least infer that they were being used for funerary purposes and other things. But later on with stone circles and things, excavations often don't find any artefacts at all. And these places seem to be kept quite clean, quite separate from everyday life, perhaps sort of sacred ritual spaces. So we can really only use our imaginations about what was happening within those spaces.

Thank you very much. Stone circles seem to appear rather late in this chronology. When was that and why was it late? So stone circles appeared for the first time in the British Isles around about 3,200 BC. That seems to be about the earliest occurrence of them. And that was in Orkney. They first appear and they seemed to spread south from Orkney. Why did it start in Orkney? That is one of the big questions. And I think there's something very special going on in Orkney. There seems to be a coming to of really quite sort of a vibrant and lively Neolithic culture. A whole series of different things are occurring in Orkney around about that time. And it seems to be...

So they have the very first appearance of groovedware pottery, which is a distinctive type of pottery that's flat-based and enables a whole range of sort of different types of food production and storage to happen for the first time. Up to that point, pottery had been round-based and seems to be predominantly for cooking and in quite small quantities and perhaps serving. So you've got that change.

You've got people living in large and agglomerated settlements for the first time. So the most famous example is Scarabray. And people seem to be also constructing stone circles. We think that perhaps they're taking the outside of a passage grave, which in Ireland was marked by a series of standing stones around the outside, and they're removing the bit in the middle and just building the circle on its own. Is this prompted by any defensive consideration? I don't think so. It would be very easy to attack a stone circle.

There's no evidence of anything like that happening at stone circles. And we do have evidence of actually attacks at other types of Neolithic monument. So there is an earlier type of earthen monument called a causewayed enclosure. And a very famous example, Crickley Hill appears to have been attacked. There's a lot of arrows found around the outside. And it seems to have been, or the timber elements seem to have been burnt down. There's actually from chamber tombs really quite a high incidence of people who've been affected by interpersonal violence. So we think about one in ten people who are buried in chamber tombs were potentially killed either through an arrowhead.

So we get arrowheads embedded in people that are buried in chamber tombs or with a blow to the head. So actually we tend to think about the early Neolithic and early agriculture as being quite peaceful. But actually there seems to have been quite a lot of violence. And I suspect it's about the creation of a family. Founding families, founding communities effectively, and people falling out over that and killing each other. Can you give the listeners a reasonably detailed account of the earliest stone circles? The Stones of Stennis in Orkney is one of the earliest stone circles.

It was a modest size. Some of the really large ones are found further south. So what about this one in Orkney? So the Stones of Stennis in Orkney is about, I think about 30. meters across. It's got a series of quite large upstanding stones. It's part of an increasingly monumental landscape in that area of Orkney. So nearby we've got the passage grave of Mays Howe, just down the road. There's a settlement called Barn House, really very, very close to the stones of Stennis. And then just across the water, we've got the Ness of Brodgar, which is a site that's

currently under excavation. And that really is another amazing conglomeration of almost monumental, houses at that particular point and it's a monumental landscape that grows and grows throughout the late Neolithic. Susan, back to you, is there any particular reason why people, why they move to stone circles? That's a really good question.

I'm not sure we know why they move. There's a shift to circular monuments that happens around about that 3,200, 3,000 BC date. We get stone circles, the earlier stone circles, as Vicki's been describing, in Orkney and also in places like Cumbria. Casselrig, that for instance.

Exactly. Casillig and another one, which you may know, Longmeg and her daughters, which seems to be a particularly early example of a large stone circle. And probably the connection to Ireland is where we kind of have to look for the origins of these circular passage tombs. The largest ones are places like New Grange where you have enormous great big circular mounds surrounded by large cobstones and in fact itself surrounded by a stone circle. So perhaps we have to look to Ireland for the ideas coming across to other parts. of Britain. But circular monuments were a fashion, really became the favoured shape for monuments, both stone circles and also earthwork hinges. Did people live there as well as go there for

deals and agreements and meetings? Not at stone circles. We have other forms of monuments where people do seem to have been living for short periods of time later on in the Neolithic, but stone circles and other circular monuments seem to be very much more ritual and ceremonial spaces. That point about circular structures is really important because at the same time you're seeing a change towards circular houses which seem to have their origin alongside a whole series of other things up in Orkney and as well as stone circles we're getting timber circles including concentric series of timber circles nested inside each other

and I think all of these new forms of monumentality that are coming in when you come to the start of the third millennium are in some way related to houses and you're getting a whole suite of structures from the very small to the very large. And this is, I suggest, about the way in which you're engineering newer and larger societies. So as you move towards the end of the Neolithic,

I think that you're finding new frameworks for mobilising larger and larger groups of population in order to construct these huge structures, like Stonehenge, like Silbury Hill, like Avebury. But what part is doing? It would be, if any, is religion playing in this? And if it is, what is it? I think it must be some change in the rituals that are being carried out and the religious beliefs. And there's a key thing about stone circles, not all of them, but some of them are related to the skies.

And you have to think about the circle being the horizon and being the skies that you can see. And a number of these stone circles are built in places where you get a good view of the horizon or of nearby hillsides and sort of almost in natural amphitheaters. And I would argue that the circularity is something to do with that. and that may be a shift in the religious beliefs. What would you have said? It's a very local example, cattle rig up in Cumberley, which I come from near Kessig.

But everything you've said, the stone circle, still marketed there, although the stones are nothing like the size of stonehen. But it is very much in a basin. It is totally surrounded by these fells. Well, let's call hills or mountains. Is that typical?

There's great variation in the kinds of locations that these monuments are placed in. So sometimes you find, particularly with stone monuments, that they come at the end of long sequences of inhabitation of a particular place. And it's almost as if there are a closing statement at the end of that kind of a sequence, bringing things to end and turning these into places of memory. In other locations, the place is clearly positioned so as to be extremely conspicuous.

So that the monument is to be seen. But you can turn that round and say that there are other monuments that are located to have commanding views. of the coast or of rivers or of hills or of mountains. Other places, again, it's clear that they've been positioned so as to fall on natural routeways so that you're going to encounter them as you move around the landscape. And that suggests that many of these monuments have a kind of nemonic character to them, that they're reminders of tradition of the past, of ancestry, and so on.

And what I think all of these things have in common is that they make us aware that these are people who have a very intense and very sincere understanding of landscape, whether it's topography or whether it's the history of landscape. Biggie, can you talk about the scientific techniques which have come into, I call it, to date the megaliths? So we're able to date megaliths through radiocarbon dating. So we would need something organic in order to get a radiocarbon date.

So human bone would be ideal or anything short-lived. And that's able to give us a date range for when something was the... deposited there. So we're able to date often use of chambered tombs, for example, through radiocarbon dating human remains. And that has led to what? It gives us a precise chronology and an understanding. We've talked throughout this about how actually it's quite a complex series of monuments being built at different times in different places by different people. And if we can pinpoint the exact dates, we can start to create more nuanced narratives about the arrival and spread of the Neolithic

and people doing particular practices like building megaliths. Susan, do you have any idea of what people at the time thought of what they were doing and why? One of the really interesting things about the radiocarbon dating recently is that we've been able to get

much more precise dates. And for example, for some of the Long Barrow, so some of the chambered tombs, we know that they're being used for burial and it used to be thought that these were places that were open for centuries and people would inter, a few people, every generation perhaps.

The radiocarbon dating has shown us that actually that's not the case and these things are being used in certain places, at least. So, for example, in the Cotswolds, for a very short period of time right at the very start of when they were constructed. And then they're not used for burial after that, so maybe two or three generations, for example. And so perhaps these are places that people are constructing in the landscape. And the human remains are not the primary purpose for building them, but are almost a kind of starting point.

The way that the monument is given life is kind of imbued with energy is by depositing. some of the dead within it, and then it becomes a monument that is part of the landscape. We know, for example, that West Kenneth Longbarrow, for example, which is a very famous tomb just near Avebury, was used then for many hundreds of years, people depositing all kinds of things in there, some burials, but also pottery and variety of different types of earth and materials until it was full, and that took place over the next 1,000 years or so. So these are burial monuments at the outset, but they don't necessarily continue as such throughout the history of their youth.

Do you want to go, Julian? I think the other point that follows on from what you've just been saying is that these people who are being buried are not, as you say, people who are being introduced over a continuous period of time. And I think that very often we could see these people as founders as the people who establish communities in particular areas. So we shouldn't see these as the equivalents of country churchyards in which people are going to be continuously buried forever and ever.

It's about the coming into being of something new. And I think what we're seeing particularly in that period at the start of the English, is the way in which an entire way of life is being established. And being in on the ground floor, being the people who established all of that in a particular area is tremendously important. I suppose what's fissiting away at the back of,

what I can love to call my mind, is that the idea of worship, the idea of the sun coming up at a certain time time and going down at a certain time and these circles particularly having some connection with that. Am I up a gum tree or what? There are some stone circles that are very precisely

aligned with the sun and also in the early Bronze Age in Scotland particularly with we think potentially the moon. So there is an interest in orientating some of these monuments and this applies as much to some of the timber monuments as well as the stone ones with the cosmos, with the skies.

And that must mean that the sun and the changing seasons and the solstices in particular solstices and equinoxes to a certain extent were important times of the year, particularly in the late Neolithic, when we have a large amount of monuments that are being built with either precise alignments like New Grange or like Stonehenge or with more general alignments in that they're orientating them to certain principal kind of directions. So that must mean that the sun and at certain times the moon as well perhaps is an important thing, whether it's a deity, whether it's something that's worshipped, whether it's something

that it's just important to align your monument with the principles of the cosmos and with your wider set of beliefs. We don't know, but it must be very integral to their religious beliefs. There's been a lot of speculation about that area, and people do wonder about it. No progress being made at all. There are the stones, there's the sun, that's about your lot. We now know that there are some monuments that have very precise alignments, but there are a lot of megalithic monuments and lots of stone circles that really don't have any precise alignments and you can stand in a stone circle and suggest it lines up with lots of things but that tends to be the case with a circular monument with lots of standing stones. So we've got a lot more precise

detail in terms of the survey information in terms of exactly which ones are aligned and which ones we think they're probably not. And I think in recent decades really this shift has become more looking at how these monuments sit within the landscape and how the landscape is also connected to these orientations. So for example we get monuments where particular clefts in in mountain ranges nearby or particular viewpoints of distinctive hilltops and things are deliberately showcased, as it were, from the monuments in relation to the movement of the sun. I think that perhaps we should turn it round because in the past people have wanted to imagine that it's almost a scientific inquiry into the movements of the heavenly bodies

that people in the past were interested in. I think it's far more about the way in which you synchronise activity and you identify particular times the equinoxies, the midsummer and so on, because that's when people are going to be gathered, that's when people are going to be coming together at a particular monument in order to conduct rituals and in order to engage in all these activities that, as I say, articulate society. And some of these megalists are decorated with art.

Now, how does that fit in? If you go down into Iberia, you find that some of the standing stones and some of the chambered tombs are, painted. But for the most part throughout Europe, when we have megalithic art, it's engraved or pecked onto the surface of the stones. In Brittany, some of this art is representational, and we have images of bows and arrows or of stone tools or of quadrupeds. But most of the art, and this is particularly in the case of Britain and Ireland, is non-representational, it's geometric. It's swirls and it's zigzags and its concentric circles and so on

and so it's very very ambiguous. So we can be correct the ambiguity? Well I think ambiguity is the point of it. Is the point. So one of the things that people emphasise is that perhaps it's the doing of the art that's more important than what it actually means because it's very often part of the process of constructing the monument. You're actually decorating stones and sometimes some of the art is actually hidden

away inside the monument and not visible. Also, sometimes you find that the most complex combinations of motifs are at significant points within the monument. So within passage tombs, it may be portals, entrances, or the backs of the chambers where the remains of the dead are being deposited. But I think that draws our attention to the experiential quality of this art, that it's part of the saturation of your senses, as you enter these monuments when they're being used alongside the remains of the dead,

alongside portable artefacts, alongside chanting. All of these things, I think, form a ritual symbolism. And so maybe, as in many societies around the world today, you have symbols that have not one but many meanings, and those meanings are elicited only in the ritual. So perhaps it's part of a system of secret knowledge. The second mention of chanting is going on here. Are there any remains whatsoever?

of music. There's at least one site where you have a bone flute and there are some perforated cattle bones which may be whistles. So there's suggestions that there may be various kinds of music going on at these sites. We're coming to the end

of the programme now. I'd like to get some idea about the community, if one can use the word I don't mean sarcastic here. Around these, did they gather around these monuments? Did they put this place there and say, we will build where we can see them, we can build

where we'll be near them, but there any sense of them being protected by, is there a connection being in the community and the circle? Yes, I think there is. I don't think they're living there permanently. I think they're quite mobile people in the late Neolithic. I think they're moving off at particular times of the year, but they're coming together

and it's very much their place, their communal circle. So I think they have an affinity to that place. They're following cattle and pig around the landscape. and we have got some smaller settlements that they're living in, but again, in a temporary fashion. So the site where we think that they were living to construct a Stonehenge at Durrington Walls, there's a lot of small but fairly ephemeral structures there, where people were probably living some of the year. Susan, do we have any idea of the size of these, of any one community to give us a guide or the size of communities?

I was talking about 40 people, 400 people. What are we talking about? It's very difficult to estimate community sizes from the settlement evidence. just because the settlement evidence is very rare. We have masses of evidence for these huge standing stones and these megaliths and these monuments, but actually it's quite rare that we come across evidence for houses outside of Orkney where they build them in stone very handily. And so we have to really rely on the skeletal remains

from these tombs to estimate population sizes, but not everybody was being buried within the tombs. So that also we have to take with a pinch of salt. But to give one example from recent research, the Hazleton North Long Barrow, which is in the Cotswolds near Gloucestershire, there's been some recent work done on the burials from that site looking at the ancient DNA from those individuals.

And it's been shown that they are three and four generations of the same interrelated family and some other people. So that suggests to us that there's a quite close-knit family relationship that relates to who gets buried in that tomb. Now we don't know if those people lived together, and we don't know if those people lived next to the tomb or dispersed across the landscape, but they were certainly buried together,

which suggests that that family group was important for the identity of those people and was important in the way that they thought about themselves as a community. When the new techniques, do you get any idea of the lifespan of these people, for instance? Not from DNA, but we can estimate that from the skeletal remains. You can look at things like teeth wear and instances of arthritis and things to estimate ages. Many people think that life was very short in this period. Actually, we have people from... What's very short?

Perhaps people say, you know, people didn't live much part, 30, but actually we do have relatively elderly people buried in these tombs, at least in their 50s and 60s. So it's not that life was nasty, brutish and short. People had relatively long lives. I mean, one of the things that we can tell about burial deposits like Hazleton North is we can look at isotopic analysis and that can actually tell us which parts of the landscape people were living in. And in the case of Haselton, we know that actually people weren't spending all of their time in the immediate area. They were actually moving around the landscape up to 40 kilometres away, and that tells us that actually people were quite mobile, but they were

still coming back and being deposited at this particular place in the landscape. Nice word from you, Julia. Well, and a consequence of that mobility is that when we're talking about the size of populations, there may be a degree of flux about that. It may be that you have groups of people who are coming together seasonally and then splitting apart at other times. We're fascinated and drawn to these monuments today, and I'm sure in the past, in prehistory, people held them in equally, if not greater significance.

We've lost so many of these monuments, and we kind of prize the ones we have that have lasted well, like Stonehenge, and we make them into World Heritage Sites. I think that moving stones, building things out of stone, and creating these monuments was a fundamental part of the lives of these people, and we can really only understand them if we, you know, investigate them thoroughly. They had to do this to be the civilization they were. Yes, it was their identity.

They were the monument builders. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks Susan Greeney, Vicki Cummings and Julian Thomas, and our studio journey Emma Hath. Next week, the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic that tells the story of the legendary prince and princess Rama and Sita. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say you'd like have said? We haven't talked a huge amount about moving stones. And one of the interesting aspects of some of these megalithic monuments,

for example New Grange in Ireland, the passage tomb, and the famous monument of Stonehenge, is that the materials that people are building these monuments out of are not just on the doorstep. They are transporting them over long distances. And in the case of the blue stones at Stonehenge, they're transporting them all the way from the Priselli Hills in Pembrokeshire, a journey of 240 kilometres or so,

probably over a mixture of land and sea. So the construction of these monuments wasn't necessarily a kind of using the materials that were immediately to hand. Some of these monuments, particularly the larger and more complex and spectacular monuments, were also demonstrations of being able to persuade enough people to bring your stones, sometimes weighing hundreds and hundreds of tons, down over, you know, for example, the sarsen stones at Stonehenger moved over about 20, 20 miles or so. That's a significant undertaking and effort. time and would have required a huge logistical kind of arrangement in order to supply those people

with enough equipment and supply those people with food and look after their children, etc. So the construction of these monuments is a huge event and part of the importance of these monuments is that process of construction. It would have been a spectacle and involving as many people as possible in that and showing off that you can do that and that you can persuade that many people to act together communally to construct those monuments is a significant part of understanding what these monuments are about.

Another thing we didn't talk about is conflict. Were there tribes within this? I've got a bigger monument than yours, that sort of thing. You're nodding. Just as we have societies that are constantly coming together, exchanging marriage partners and so on, they're also

just constantly fighting each other. It's not warfare in the modern sense. It's just a sense that there a continual churning over of violence, which is the opposite side of the coin of exchange. Why are they finding each other for more land or more? Not so much land. I think that in the early part of the Neolithic,

the really important currency is cattle, because cattle are mobile wealth. And I think that you gradually accumulate cattle, which you can give as feast animals, you can lend them out to other people and acquire followers in that way. you can kill them when you have a dispute with someone.

They're exchangeable for all kinds of things. So I think cattle raiding is one of the big things in the early Neolithic. What sort of castle would there be? Longhorn, short horn. Short horn, quite small cattle in our terms. Yes. They wouldn't have horses at that stage, would they? No, that's a big issue because there are horses in the Upper Pellianithic.

Yes. That's right. And then they sort of disappear. There's a hint that there may be some horses knocking around towards the end of the Neolithic. Early Bronze Age, really. After the main period of megalith building is when the first domestic horses arrive. I would say there's an alternative perspective to thinking about those violently killed people being in these tombs is that maybe people who were violently killed were selected to be part of these burial groups.

Often the sort of population that seems to be chosen for burial in these tombs has special qualities about them. There's a site called War Barrow down on Cranbourne Chase where people seem to have had a number of different disabilities, what we would think of today anyway as disabilities, or particular aspects of the way that they looked or the kind of diseases that they suffered from, which may have meant that they were selected

to be part of these burial groups. And that might have been, perhaps these people suffered with things like epilepsy, and they were seen as being very different, or perhaps people who could travel between worlds. and I sense that the idea that you were killed in conflict might be something that qualified you to be almost a martyr or a hero that would be given burial in one of these tombs. So we might not take the kind of high incidence of violence of being applicable to everybody, perhaps. Yes, an inauspicious death because that perhaps fits with the idea that you very often find at Neolithic Enclosiers.

You have the burial of very young children. And again, that might be an inauspicious death. I think the problem here is that actually there's lots and lots of different things going on in lots and lots of different places and we're trying to talk quite generally about what life was like in the Neolithic and I think it's just going to be very very different in different parts of Britain and Ireland and then that itself is going to change over time so it is quite hard to come up with a sort of a general overall theme from what is clearly quite a diverse set of practices we concentrated on Britain and Ireland a little touch of francy in the night as it were but are these monuments

bigger and much more different elsewhere? There are very similar monuments in parts of Atlantic Europe. If you think about dolmens, for example, in western France, the Karnak, the standing stone rows. We have some stone rows in Britain, but not quite to the extent that we have. Karnak is amazing. Yeah, the kind of multiple stone rows of Karnak are not found here. Across the world, there are dolmens, there are tombs,

there are megalithic chambered tombs very similar. there are standing, freestanding stones are found in many, many different places. There are only a limited number of things you can do with big stones. One of them is pile up them on top of each other and put vertical stones up and create a kind of box or a chamber. And you can have them as freestanding monuments. And I guess one unique one is perhaps Stonehenge in that they make the kind of the lintels, the horizontal stones, which we don't find anywhere else in the world. But in essence, people do what they can.

The full range of things that you could possibly do with stones are being used. done in different parts of the world in different times. I think the question that absolutely follows on from that is, is it simply that the idea of building large monuments out of stones is something that's going to occur to lots of different groups of people independently? Or is there a megalithic idea which starts in one place and spreads around the world? If you go back to the 1870s, you have James Ferguson talking about the idea of a megalithic race that starts somewhere in northern India

and explodes out across the globe, taking their megalists with them. Between the wars you have hyper-diffusionists like Grafton Elliott Smith who have the idea of a heliolithic civilisation that starts out in ancient Egypt and spreads by trade and exchange right the way around the world

and then Gordon Child in the 1920s he's talking about the idea of megalithic missionaries who are bringing a megalithic cult out of the Mediterranean to north-west Europe and that only goes away as an idea when we find out that the monuments in the Mediterranean that are supposed to be the progenitors of the Atlantic megaliths

are actually later in date than the ones that we find in Britain and Brittany. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. I enjoyed that. There are a lot of people. I enjoyed a lot. Thank you. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Please, I beg you in the name of God. I need some assistance from you. Who is worthy of our trust? I just thought this is very, very, very. shady and there's something definitely wrong about this.

He didn't believe me. I say, well, I'm not a scammer. I'm not a bad person. Join me, Matthew Side, for the latest season of my BBC Radio 4 podcast, Sideways. Seven new stories of seeing the world differently and the ideas that shape our lives. I need to figure out a way to really compensate him or else I'm going to be the scammer that I accused him of being. Sideways on BBC Sounds.