These are societies that clearly don't have the state. They don't probably have fully instituted elites, there's probably a certain amount of jockeying for position within these societies. So on the one hand, it's a way of increasing your profile within society to be the person who's responsible for setting up or inspiring. You build the monument. Absolutely. Or you organize the people to build the monument and you have the feasting and you have ritual activities that you are on the side with. Well, we certainly do get the remains of feasts in the forms of particularly in Scandinavia,. Huge quantities of smashed pottery outside the tombs in the four quarts of other tom
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.