4. Megaliths were not settlements
The discovery of items like pottery, animal bones and bone flutes around megaliths suggests they were used as feasting sites and hubs of social activity rather than being places people lived in or next to. It’s likely that they played a significant role in bringing together dispersed agricultural populations, perhaps to exchange gifts, meet marriage partners, swap information and so on.
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A stone megalith from The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney
The discovery – via DNA tests – of five generations of family buried together in Hazelton long barrow in the Cotswolds reveals the social cohesion of the sites.
5. Many of those buried in megalith tombs had met an untimely death
The social groups did not always co-exist in peace: “We think about one in ten people who were buried in chamber tombs were potentially killed either through an arrowhead or a blow to the head,” says Vicki Cummings.
6. Farmers may have been among the first megalith creators
During the Neolithic period, people were coming to Britain from continental Europe with the first domestic crops but also bringing traditions of building monuments. At one stage, the link between megaliths and farmers was thought to very strong because of this, but also because of the likelihood that only they would have the supplies to feed the people constructing the megaliths. However, there is evidence from other countries, including and Japan, that hunter-gatherers were just as likely to establish megaliths.
7. Megaliths were part of a spiritual landscape
In the programme, Melvyn Bragg is particularly keen to establish any link between megaliths and religion. Vicki Cummings believes that “ritual specialists” were involved in burials and that they would have had preferential access to the tombs. The religious persuasion of these specialists would, according to Julian Thomas, be quite fluid.
“Because it's traditional oral religion rather than written religion,” Julian says, “I think it's very likely that you don't have a kind of a presiding deity or an idea of different realms like heaven or hell. Instead, I think it's likely that spirits, deities, ancestors are understood as being imminent in the landscape.”
8. Some were aligned with the cosmos
One of the reasons people look for religious significance in megaliths is that some of them appear to have been deliberately aligned, such as Stonehenge to the summer solstice and Newgrange to the winter solstice. However, not every megalith aligns in an obvious way – sometimes it’s more a case of alignment with a particular view, such as of hilltops or mountain ranges.
“When people are actually constructing these monuments and reorganising the landscape,” Julian says, “it's as if they're engineering the cosmology at the same time.”
