Rock paintings from the Western Cape

Britain, Ireland and northern France are the main areas where megalithic monuments can be found. This probably shows that the people of these three areas were in regular contact, traveling across the English Channel and the Irish Sea, when the megaliths were erected. They must have had similar religious beliefs and ceremonies, although we know very little about it. There were once many megaliths, but in the 1700s and 1800s farmers cleared away large numbers of these monuments from their fields.

Towering standing stones, massive stone circles and vast rows of stones are the remains of the prehistoric times. Some of them are so large that no one knows how Bronze Age people managed to built them. Because they are so big, they are known as megaliths, a term that comes from two Greek words meaning huge stones.

Another mystery is exactly what these vast monuments were for. Archeologists think they may have been used for religious ceremonies. The stones are often lined up with yearly movements of the Sun and stars, so the ceremonies were almost certainly linked to the calendar and the seasons. They may have been fertility ceremonies, relating the crop-growing season to the annual movements of the stars.

There are two famous groups of megaliths in Europe, one on England’s Salisbury Plain, the other in Brittany, France. Many of the British monuments are stone circles, the most famous are at Stonehenge and Avebury. The main monument in Britain is a series of rows, or alignments, of stones near the village of Carnac. In both cases there are many other prehistoric alignments, earthworks, burial mounds and single standing stones. Together these structures make out entire religions that would have been known as holy places, landscapes devoted to religion.

The builders of the megalithic monuments had to move and lift huge stones, dig long ditches and pile up enormous mounds of earth. Yet the people of Bronze Age had no complex machinery, only rollers, levers, ropes and simple hand tools. It must have taken the labour of hundreds of people over many years to move the stones. Clearly, a great deal of organization was needed, and probably a ruler with enough power to keep everyone at work at the task. Planning was also important, so that the builderscould work out the precise positions for the stone. These vast temples suggest that Bronze Age societies were far more advanced than you would expect, considering the simple tools they had.