The way that the monument is given life is by depositing some of the dead within it. And then it becomes a monument that is part of the landscape. So these are burial monuments at the outset, but they don't necessarily continue as such throughout their youth. We shouldn't see these as the equivalents of country churchyards in which people are going to be continuously buried forever and ever. It's about the coming into being of something new.
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.