Skeletal remains can be used to estimate ages of people buried in tombs like Hasselton North. isotopic analysis tells us which parts of the landscape people were living in, and that they weren't spending all their time in the immediate area. They were actually moving around the landscape up to 40 kilometers away. We're fascinated by these monuments today but I'm sure in prehistory people held them in equally, if not greater, significance.
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.