The word megalith comes from the ancient Greek words “mega” meaning huge and “lithos”, meaning stone. Be introduced to the archaeological history of megaliths and the open ended question as to why it is, despite often varying unrelated cultural differences, that these stone structures appear all over the globe. We will then investigate in more detail, the latest research into the origin and meaning of the 35,000 megaliths, to be found in Europe and around that continent.
- Magdalena Midgley, The Megaliths of Northern Europe (Routledge: 2008)
- Bettina Schulz Paulson, Time and Stone: The Emergence and Development of Megaliths and Megalithic Societies in Europe (Archeopress: 2017)
An Introduction to Megaliths
- Defining megaliths – Menhirs, Dolmens, Stone Circles and Graves.
- The archaeological history of megaliths.
- The universality of megalithic structures and the limitations of a global category.
- Megaliths in Australia, the Pacific Islands, Asia, the Americas and Africa.
- Megaliths today.
The Origin and Meaning of Megaliths in Europe
- Megalithic structures in Anatolia – Göbekli Tepe.
- Did European Megaliths first emerge in Brittany?
- The Megalithic Structures of France, Spain, Corsica Sardinia and the Mediterranean.
- Stonehenge
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Analyse varying megalithic structures, such as Menhirs, Dolmens, Stone Circles, while acknowledging the limitations of such categories.
- Understand how the archaeological study of megaliths has evolved, both with new evidence and technological advances in the field of archaeology.
