Megalithic monuments of Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe
- Date
- c. 3700 – 2900 BCE
- Category
- Culture, arts & philosophy
- Region
- Western Europe (Malta, Ireland, Britain)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In the fourth and early third millennia BCE, Neolithic communities along Europe's Atlantic and Mediterranean fringes raised enormous monuments of stone and earth, among the most ambitious constructions of the pre-literate world.
On the Maltese islands, builders erected the free-standing temples of Ġgantija and others from around 3600 BCE, working multi-tonne limestone blocks without metal tools or the wheel. In Ireland's Boyne Valley, the great passage tomb of Newgrange was completed around 3200 BCE, its inner chamber engineered so that the rising midwinter-solstice sun shines down the passage to illuminate the back recess, a feat of astronomical alignment and corbelled engineering. In southern Britain, the first phase of Stonehenge, a circular ditch, bank and ring of pits, was laid out around 3000 BCE and used as a cremation cemetery long before the famous sarsen stones were raised. These monuments demanded large coordinated workforces and embodied shared cosmologies of the dead, the ancestors and the movements of the sun, marking the landscape with durable statements of communal identity and belief.
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Further reading
The wider story
The Story of Art
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