archaeology because we're dealing with societies that don't have written records. So it's almost as if megalists form a kind of barometer for archaeological thinking, and every time the ideas change. It's far more likely that religion is quite fluid and varies from one group to another. Because it's traditional or oral religion rather than written religion, I think it's very likely that you don't have a kind of a presiding deity. Instead, it's likely that spirits, deities, ancestors are understood as being imminent in the landscape. When people were actually constructing these monuments,. it's as if they're engineering the cosmology at the same time.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.
Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.
With
Vicki Cummings
Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire
Julian Thomas
Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester
and
Susan Greaney
Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.