I think the problem here is that actually there's lots and lots of different things going on in lots andLots of different places. And we're trying to talk quite generally about what life was like in the Neolithic and I think it's just going to be very very different in different parts of Britain and Ireland. Across the world there are dolmens, there are tombs, there are megalithic and chambered tombs very similar. There are free standing stones are found in many many different places. One unique one is perhaps stonehenge and they make the kind of the lintels, the horizontal stones which we don't find anywhere else in the world. But
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.