Neolithic Tombs of Wales
REVIEW BY KEITH RAY Neolithic Tombs of Wales is a revised edition of a book with similar scope that was published 20 years ago by the same publisher. It is fundamentally a field guide to around 100 sites whose remains…
megaliths
Stone Lands: a journey of darkness and light through Britain’s ancient places
REVIEW BY JOE FLATMAN The Stone Lands book launch was held on a sun-kissed midsummer’s evening on a farm near Avebury, followed by a guided walk led by the author to West Kennet long barrow. It was the perfect blend…
CA Letters 417 – November
The Altar Stone Engravings I was recently researching the Historic England archive of Richard Atkinson’s 1958 excavations at Stonehenge, and two photographs (P50106, ; and P50107, ) revealed an astonishing feature of the Altar Stone. The photographs partially show the…
Stonehenge’s Scottish connection
New research suggests that one of Stonehenge’s famous megaliths may have come from the very north of the UK. The Altar Stone is a six-tonne sandstone slab that currently lies in the middle of the famous stone circle. It was…
Stone Circles: A Field Guide
REVIEW BY ROB IXER This is a book for stone circle fans. After a brief but succinct account of prehistoric stone circle-building, the stones are described starting at the geographical (and perhaps interest-wise) top in Orkney, around the Ness of…
Scottish origins for the Stonehenge Altar Stone? Geological clues to an astonishing Neolithic journey
Cutting-edge scientific research indicates that a stone at the centre of Stonehenge may have travelled hundreds of miles from north-east Scotland to Salisbury Plain. Carly Hilts reports.
Illuminating Anglesey: Echoes of a later prehistoric ritualised landscape at Bedd y Foel
Recent investigations on the slopes of Pen y Foel, and a wider survey of its surrounding landscape, have shed new light on a previously undocumented
dolmen and other later prehistoric monuments. Mike Woods, Arwyn Owen, and George Nash take up the story of a long-forgotten and recently rediscovered ritualised landscape.
Rolling stones
From the Preseli Hills of Wales to the site of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain is 120 miles as the crow flies. That is quite some distance for the young farmers of Neolithic Wales to transport the bluestones that make up the inner circle at the Wiltshire monument. During April 2024, Professor Keith Ray of Cardiff University took two weeks to walk from west Wales to Stonehenge, accompanied by a series of archaeologists and anthropologists (a different one or two each day) to look at the landscape and consider the challenges facing the stone-bearers. Among them were CA’s editor Carly Hilts and Chris Catling, who now reports.
Megaliths of the World: Volume I
REVIEW BY GEORGE NASH The burial monumentality associated with the Neolithic is very much a global phenomenon. This desire to bury the dead in an artificial cave covered with an earthen or cairn mound occurs over at least six millennia.…
Home of Neolithic monument makers discovered in France
The settlement was discovered by a team of researchers at the site of Le Peu in the Charente department, a landscape scattered with Middle Neolithic (c.3700-4700 BC) dolmens and long barrows.
Conjuring Mongolian deer stones: biographical statuary of Bronze Age Central Asia and south Siberia
The enigmatic deer stones speckling the Mongolian steppe have long invited questions. Now fresh research is providing clues to why they were carved and what they may represent. William Fitzhugh and Richard Kortum, with Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, share the story of these remarkable relics.
Research sheds light on major megalithic site in Spain
The site, known as La Torre- La Janera, covers an area of c.600ha near the Guadiana River in the province of Huelva.
Circles of stone: Stonehenge and prehistoric Japan
A new exhibition at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre explores striking similarities between the stone monuments built by two unconnected but contemporary cultures, 6,000 miles apart. Carly Hilts went to find out more.
How to Build Stonehenge
Review by Susan Greaney. This elegant new volume is the first book for over 60 years to focus specifically on how the world-famous Neolithic monument of Stonehenge was constructed. The narrative progresses through the step-by-step process of the extraction, transport,…
This week: Remarkable stones
According to the 12th-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, the famous stones that make up the Stonehenge monument were erected originally in Ireland, before being moved to their current, more familiar home on Salisbury Plain. Geoffrey’s claim may seem fanciful, but…
Remarkable Stones Quiz
The historic boundary-marker known as the London Stone, indicating the downstream limits of the City's jurisdiction, is located at which point on the Thames Estuary?
Designed to enchant: the great dolmens of Neolithic northern Europe
The word ‘dolmen’ – derived from the Breton taol maen (‘stone table’) – is regarded as a folk term for Neolithic monuments that consist of a massive capstone supported by three or more upright stones, or orthostats. Archaeologists have sought to subdivide these monuments into more precise typological categories, but Vicki Cummings and Colin Richards, the authors of Monuments in the Making, politely suggest that they are wrong to do so. Is it time to reclaim the word? Chris Catling reports.
Phallic-shaped Ethiopian monuments 1,000 years older than previously thought
Southern Ethiopia’s Gedeo Zone is home to many megalithic stelae that reach up to 6m in height, with an estimate of more than 10,000 across some 60 sites. Some resemble phalluses, others have faces or anthropomorphic designs, while some are…
CA Letters – December 2021
Your views on the latest issues of CA.
Bretons and Britons: the fight for identity
This well-illustrated book on Breton identity is a development of Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean (2001), in which he successfully carves out a broad Atlantic cultural identity, separate to that of central Europe. Echoing the great Cyril Fox, Cunliffe’s opening chapter…
Great Sites of the Ancient World
This gloriously illustrated volume takes readers on a tour of 100 archaeological sites around the world. While many of the selections are familiar entries in lists of great sites – such as the Giza plateau, Machu Picchu, and Hadrian’s Wall…
Pre and Protohistoric Stone Architectures: comparisons of the social and technical contexts associated to their building
Generically, monuments are organised using four recognised architectural elements: the mound, the entrance or façade, the passage, and the chamber. I suppose a fifth element could be landscape. These clear building traits are repeated across much of Atlantic Europe. However, there…
Dating the Plain of Jars
It is evident that the sites were reused over time, well into the historic period, and had retained some kind of ritual significance when the later burials took place in the 9th-13th century AD.
University of Glasgow project to shed light on modern-day burial mounds
They will investigate the recent trend in constructing burial mounds as a columbarium – a place for housing the cremated remains of the deceased.
Megaliths and Geology
One of the essentials of building a megalithic chambered burial monument is the choice of materials used to construct it. It is now considered that stone (boulders, stone erratics and fragments, and quarried stone) used in the construction of megaliths was…
Stonehenge: a recycled Welsh monument
Recent research has potentially identified an intriguing new connection between Stonehenge and a partially dismantled stone circle in south-west Wales – furthering the connection between these two areas during the Neolithic period. Previous work on the origins of Stonehenge’s smaller…
Where to build a monument: mapping megaliths on Easter Island
A new study proposes links between the locations of Easter Island’s famous ahu and moai and freshwater sources. Robert J DiNapoli discusses the results and their implications.
Göbekli Tepe: a new World Heritage Site
In the last decade, Göbekli Tepe has gradually moved into the focus of public interest, as seen in the increasing numbers of visitors, a trend that broke off in 2015 following the spread of conflict to nearby parts of northern Syria.
Secondhand Stonehenge? Welsh origins of a Wiltshire monument
It has long been understood that the Stonehenge ‘bluestones’ – a catch-all term used to describe any of the monument’s uprights that are not thought to have been sourced locally – represent a variety of different types of rock, but their origins have been a subject for heated debate. Now archaeological and geological research have combined to pin down some of their sources, and to shed new light on how – and why – the stones were brought to Salisbury Plain. Mike Parker Pearson explains.
How to build a dolmen: exploring Neolithic construction at Garn Turne
Well known on the Continent and scattered along the coasts of Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland, dolmens are an immediately recognisable form of chambered tomb. They represent remarkable achievements for their Neolithic builders, crowned with stones weighing as much as 160 tonnes. Vicki Cummings and Colin Richards investigate how these distinctive monuments were constructed – and what happened when a project did not go to plan.