http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== < Main Page Chapter 9 Communal Tombs Earthen long barrows (or long mounds) appear in Britain from around 4000BCE, as far as is known, since the earliest known example is White Barrow at Tilshead in Wiltshire which could have been built about this time. It is over 80 metres long by some 50 metres wide and indications are, as with other long barrows, that it is a mound of earth built over a building thought to have been an ossuary. Because these structures were constructed of timber, they have disappeared, leaving the mound as the surviving structure. Examples in England are part of a European long barrow province stretching from Poland to Ireland with excavated mortuary houses/long mounds in Poland, Germany and Denmark. It has long been suggested that each of these barrows served as the ancestral 'marker' for the territory of a group of people located in a specific part of a landscape. If so, in the Windmill Hill/Avebury area, where there are so many barrows close together the agricultural territories would have been so small that they could not have supported more than 20-30 people It is difficult to know how long each of these sites was in use. A timber building would not have lasted as long as a hundred years and so far there is no evidence in the examples examined of renewal although there is evidence of additions and modifications. Of course, the heaping up of a mound over the structures was the closing act in the process. We have not got enough bones under barrows to represent all the dead in the vicinity over that period of time so there may have been an element of selection of individuals unless the time period was shorter. There may also have been an element of selection in the choice of bones deposited. Usually only long bones and skulls are found under Neolithic barrows and this suggests that perhaps the deposition was the end product of the practice of excarnation when bodies were exposed in the open air to predators who removed flesh and smaller bones Two excavated examples at South Street and Beckhampton close to Silbury Hill in Wiltshire produced no evidence of human skeletal material under their mounds and the reason for their construction is unclear. Excavations of other earthen long barrows have found piles of bones at the broader ends of mounds which are almost always orientated in an easterly direction. Under the mound at Nutbane in Hampshire a fenced enclosure fronted by a mortuary house with a facade was the final phase of a series of timber structures that terminated with the placing of piles of human bones on a chalk-and-flint platform. After this the whole area was sealed by the heaping up of the mound over the site. Similarly, excavation of Fussell's Lodge mound in Wiltshire showed that it resulted from the filling in and covering over of a large timber enclosure with a porched entrance at one end. These two examples seem to be representative of arrangements that could have produced timber versions of a megalithic barrow. All the interpretations are based on posthole evidence, but one site at Haddenham (Cambs) has preserved in anaerobic conditions a complete wooden chamber. Earthen barrows and megalithic barrows are not totally differentiated on some sites. At Gwernvale (Powys) and Wayland's Smithy (Berkshire), earthen barrows were succeeded on the same spot by megalithic ones while at Whitewell (Yorkshire) timber and megalithic materials were used in the same barrow. By the beginning of the fifth millennium BCE the earliest megalithic tombs were being built in Europe. They were making their appearance in a territory that stretched from north-western Europe to the western Mediterranean and in the northern part of this region they are now creating some archaeological controversy because they have traditionally been assigned to the Neolithic but new radiocarbon dates for them in the period that is labelled as `Late Mesolithic' are being quoted in western Sweden, Northern Ireland, Brittany and Spain. These early dates centre around 5000BCE. The oldest so far is in the Irish megalithic cemetery at Carrowmore in Sligo - 5,400BCE for Tomb 4, one of some 65 surviving tombs most of which are passage graves with a round mound covering a passage with a chamber at the end (dolmens ā coloir in France). Other early dates in the late sixth and early fifth millennia BCE come from Carnac, Poitiers, Galicia and perhaps the coastal megaliths in the Isles of Scilly. Many late-Mesolithic economies were based on the rich maritime resources of the western European littoral and were able to become sedentary and it is in this context that these first megalithic tombs seem to appear. Later, similar conurbations of megalithic tombs appear in western parts of France, Iberia, Britain, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean islands It has been suggested that these different groups may have evolved independently like those in Ireland although none as early although all certainly before 3000BC . Some of these tombs are partly cut into rock as in the Paris basin and in southern Iberia. Spain and Portugal can boast a variety of types including gallery graves (under a long mound), passage graves (under a round mound) and structures with plans intermediate between the two. Denmark and southern Sweden contain single-chamber tombs known as dösar (sing. dös) in Sweden and dysser (sing. dysse) in Denmark. Later appear large passage graves referred to by the dramatic name 'giant's graves' (jaettestuer in Denmark) and found also in the Boyne valley in Ireland. In Holland, hunebed have a rectangular burial chamber covered by a round or oval mound. Allées couvertes is the name given in France to the megalithic long barrows of northern France and the British Isles which take their name from the large stones that were used to build the chambers found under long mounds. In most cases, like the example at West Kennet near Avebury in Wiltshire, the chambers are arranged at the eastern ends but there are examples with chambers in the sides of the mounds. Bones and pottery were deposited in the chambers over a long period of time. In the case of West Kennet, the excavator says this was for a thousand years before the entrance was blocked with enormous stones. Perhaps at the same time the earth and chalk mound was piled on top. Similar large deposits of pottery feature in megalithic barrows on the Continent. At Emmeln 2, east of Emms, over one thousand pots were deposited. At Havelte D53 in the Netherlands were 650 pots. In north-eastern Scotland Camster Cairns have segmented chambers under a round mound. In the same area Clava Cairns have passages leading to cruciform chambers under round mounds surrounded by rings of standing stones. Another type has a circular 'doughnut' bank with a space in the middle where cremations were buried. These monuments belong to the second part of the Neolithic period. In western Scotland are Clyde Tombs consisting of single long chambers under round mounds. The Stalled Cairn has a long segmented chamber under a long mound. This type is common in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland. In Orkney, the stalled cairns which contained the stored bones of the earlier Neolithic period do have passage-grave successors, the most famous of which is Maes Howe. This passage grave is one of the most impressive of all prehistoric monuments. Under the round mound a passage leads to a chamber with smaller chambers set off it. In Ireland the main classifications are passage graves, court cairns, portal dolmens, and the wedge tombs, later than the other types and characteristic of western Ireland. A southern Irish brand of megalithic tomb sometimes known as an entrance grave is probably a smaller cousin of the passage grave .and has a small round mound and a small chamber approached by a short open passage. Court cairns have forecourts almost entirely surrounded by banks with chambers opening off them on the opposite side to the narrow entrances. Above the chambers are broad, long mounds. These impressive monuments are found mainly in northern Ireland and are the earliest of the Irish megalithic long barrows. The standard megalithic burial tradition in a long mound of the later Neolithic period is the portal dolmen which has a single chamber in a long mound. At Newgrange, Dowth and Knowth in the Boyne valley in Ireland, the stones used to construct the chambers and the kerbs of stones that surround the great mounds are pecked with designs of megalithic (or passage grave) art. Newgrange, dated to 3,100BCE, has an entrance passage aligned with the midwinter sunrise so that the first rays shine down a tunnel above it into the main chamber which has a corbelled roof, one smaller side-chamber contains a stone bowl and excavations have found traces of the cremated bone which was originally stored in the tomb. At Knowth and at the Cairn T at Loughcrew, Co Meath, the rising moon at certain times of the year sends a shaft of light directly down a passage to illuminate a stone at the end. Both stones are carved but at Knowth it has been discovered that the carvings represent the lunar maria, that is, the markings on the moon surface that surround the central highlands as they would appear in a full moon after midnight. Other passage graves in the Boyne valley and further afield in Wales and in Brittany share similar arrangements as do the passage graves in Orkney and sites like Stonehenge either in relation to the moon or to the rising midwinter sun at the winter solstice. Burial in an open tomb may seem to us to be a strange rite but similar practices exist up to the present day. In Madagascar, structures like the megalithic tombs in Europe were succeeded by stone and concrete ones during the nineteenth century but continue to serve the same purpose, that is, to store the resurrected bones of corpses who have spent some two or more years in a grave. Bones already in the tomb are rewrapped in silken cloths and replaced in the repository at the time of each fresh deposit. The ceremony is known as famadihana and is similar to the practice in the Naples region of southern Italy where the desiccated and resurrected corpse is regularly treated in the same way when stored in a loculo. The most modern example is the concrete ossuary at the French memorial at Douaument on the Verdun battlefield where the retrieved bones of 130,000 French and German soldiers are stored and can be viewed through windows in the structure which is shaped like an enormous long barrow. Megalithic engraving associated with these stone monuments is an important asset in the study of the mind-sets of the people who were constructing them although we are still at the beginning of such a study. It was first recognised, engraved with the aid of stone tools, on the megaliths used to construct the Passage Graves. The imagery is almost all abstract and probably symbolic and only common in Ireland and Brittany in north-western France although examples are increasingly being found elsewhere. The First Farmers in Europe [LINK] main page [LINK] The Beginnings of Metallurgy in Europe [LINK]