The megaliths
Communities across Atlantic Europe start hauling enormous stones to build tombs for the collective dead.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.5 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
From around 4800 BCE, chambered tombs, passage graves, dolmens and standing stones appear along the Atlantic facade from Portugal to Scandinavia. Recent radiocarbon work suggests the tradition originates in northwest France and spreads by sea. The tombs hold many individuals rather than one, mixed and rearranged over generations, which reads as an assertion of collective ancestry — plausibly a claim to land by people who had recently begun to own it.