The Age of the Gods

IX. The Origins of the Megalithic Culture and Its Expansion in Western Europe

141 ix The Origins of the Megalithic Culture and Its Expansion in Western Europe i. nature and distribution of the megalithic culture The problem of the Megalithic Culture lies at the root of the whole question of the origins of the higher culture in Western europe. We have seen that the culture of the west in neolithic times was of a very backward type. It was an outlying region, and the cultural currents transmitted from the great centres of civilisation in the Near east only reached it late and indirectly. While the eastern europe and the danube region already possessed a settled and semi-civilised peasant culture, in the west the conditions of life were hardly in advance of what they had been in palæolithic times—indeed from some points of view, such as art, they were even more retrograde. We can distinguish different types of culture, that of the Kitchen Midden settlements on the Baltic, the Campignian flint-using culture of Northern france, and the Cave Culture of Central spain, which carries on the old tradition of the Capsian culture, but all of them agree in their poverty and barbarism. Throughout Western europe a scanty population eked out a bare existence as hunters and food gatherers. In the later neolithic period, however, we find the sudden appearance of quite a new type of culture. Instead of burying the dead under the dwelling-places without either sepulchre or funeral offerings, as had been done in the Kitchen Midden settlements, great stone graves, constructed with enormous labour, make their appearance, in which the dead are buried with careful rites and numerous offerings. There is 142 The Age of the Gods nothing to connect these new burial customs with anything that went before, at any rate in North-western europe, in france, the British Isles, and scandinavia. They must have been introduced from without, and the fact that the earliest graves of this type are always found on or near the sea-coast suggests that the people who introduced them came by sea. The simplest type of megalithic grave is a stone chamber formed of three to six upright stones with a single great roofing slab. This is the dolmen or “stone table,” and it is usually assumed to be the earliest form. The more elaborate types, consisting of a long corridor leading to a chamber, or of a corridor only, are believed to be the result of a later development. With the partial substitution of dry masonry for great monolithic blocks, a process of degeneration sets in, and the last type of all is the small cist or box, made of flagstones rather than blocks, and usually used for a simple interment, unlike the earlier tombs, which were collective sepulchres. The megalithic structures, which are not tombs, but are usually found in association with them, such as the Menhir or monolith, the stone circle and the stone row, are also believed to be a later development, and generally date from the Bronze age. These rude stone monuments, standing generally in desolate places, on barren moors or rocky headlands, are far the most impressive prehistoric remains that are to be found in Western europe, and it is natural that they aroused men’s wonder and curiosity, long before there was any general interest or understanding with regard to prehistoric culture . as the names of the monuments show, all kinds of legends clustered round them from very early times. The dolmens are “huts of the fairies,” or, among the more sophisticated, “druids’ altars,” the Long Barrows are “giants’ graves” in england, “Beds of the huns” in germany , “Tombs of the giants” in sardinia. from the seventeenth century onwards, stonehenge, at least, aroused a really scientific interest, and numerous theories—most of them wild enough, it is true,—were invented to account for them. and with the coming of wider knowledge in the nineteenth century, the mystery of these monuments only increased. for it was discovered that they were not confined to a single country or even to a single continent , but that they extend from the far west of europe and africa to the far east of asia and even out into the Pacific. The Megalithic Culture 143 In Western europe they form four main groups—one including the western coasts of great Britain and the whole of Ireland, another in denmark and the southern Baltic, a third in Brittany...