Is there a megalithic idea which starts in one place and spreads around the world? If you go back to the 1870s you have James Ferguson talking about the idea of aMegalithic race that explodes out across the globe. And then Gordon Child in the 1920s is talking about the Idea of Megalithic missionaries who are bringing amegalithic cult out of the Mediterranean to northwest Europe. That only goes away as an idea when we find out that the monuments in the Mediterranean that are supposed to be the progenitors of the Atlantic megaliths are actually later in date than the ones that we find in Britain and Britain. Join Matthew Side for the latest
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.