There isn't a huge amount of evidence for grave goods in the early Neolithic. In the later Neolithic we get some cremations that have got very fine objects with them, such as polished stone mace heads. These items seem to have been symbols of status and power. Were the people specially designed to look after burials, the equivalent of priests? I suspect there were specialists who were allowed to go into some of these tombs and interact with the dead.
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.