Dolmens are visually spectacular sites, with a design geared far more towards ostentatious display than the practicalities of a burial space.Weighing in at around 80 tonnes, the Garn Turne Major capstone is a truly massive slab of rock. It is often assumed that dolmens were constructed for a funerary purpose.
They were dedicated to a cult worshipping a fertility goddess. It seems that the monument had once stood in a large pit, much like Arthur’s Stone on the Gower, but at a later date, after it had collapsed, the dolmen was surrounded with a platform of stones and soil, hiding the pit and toppled uprights.
These uprights were also quarried stones, with their inner sides smoothed and the outer left natural.Our site was not isolated in the historic environment. When we first arrived on site, the monument’s forecourt — an open area perhaps for assembly — appeared to have a natural outcrop in the middle of it, an arrangement unparalleled at other dolmen sites in Britain or Ireland.Overlooking the collapsed remains of the main dolmen — a type of Neolithic chambered tomb — at Garn Turne in Pembrokeshire.Archaeological heavyweight: Brownshill in Co. Carlow (Kernanstown) boasts one of the largest capstones known anywhere in Europe, at a staggering 160 tonnes.It is not surprising that disaster struck when working with such massive and unwieldy materials.
Their design has also frustrated generations of archaeologists attempting excavation; dolmens are effectively open boxes that have been exposed to the elements — and curious fingers — for millennia. Until that time the examination of these “strange” monuments, scattered here and there, gav… Who raised these grand structures? Digging a dolmen: while previous projects have focused on the architecture or contents of these 6,000-year-old tombs, our investigation aims to unpick how they were put together.Our project took a different approach, exploring how dolmens were constructed. Megalithic monuments are among the earliest and most permanent of archaeological structures, and so many of them were used, or more properly, have been used and reused for thousands of years. Finds excavated from within many of the dolmens illustrate that they were typically used for elite burials. Weighing in at around 80 tonnes, the Garn Turne Major capstone is a truly massive slab of rock. Analysis of this layer of the pit yielded dates in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age (2464-2210 BC, and 2618-2470 BC). Supposedly the dolmens were used to hide and protect metal objects: gold, silver, bronze, jewels and some other treasure. The word dolmen, which derives from Breton t(d)aol meaning table and men or min meaning stone, appears in the scientific debate around the end of the 1700s CE. They are claimed to belong to a population certainly different from that which built the previous megalithic temples. Most of the dolmens were built at the end of the third and the beginning of the second millennium BC, that is, at the end of the Neolithic and in the Bronze Age. All rights reserved.This deliberate working of the surfaces makes dolmens the earliest form of monument in Britain and Ireland to incorporate quarried and shaped stones. What kinds of instruments were used to work with the stones all those centuries ago?
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