dolmen

dolmen, a type of stone monument found in a variety of places throughout the world. Dolmens are made of two or more upright stones with a single stone lying across them. The most widely known dolmens are found in northwest Europe, notably in the region of Brittany, France; southern Scandinavia; Britain; Ireland; and the Low Countries. The term dolmen is also used in relation to sites in central and southern Europe, particularly central and southern France, the Iberian Peninsula, Switzerland, Italy, and islands in the Mediterranean. Dolmens are also known from parts of Africa and Asia. More than 30,000 such monuments, making up some two-fifths of the world’s total, are in Korea alone, and in 2000 three of the Korean dolmen sites—at Koch’ang (Gochang), Hwasun, and Kanghwa (Ganghwa) in South Korea—were designated UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The dolmens of northwest Europe were built in the early Neolithic Period (New Stone Age), which began in Brittany about 5000 bce and in Britain, Ireland and southern Scandinavia about 4000 bce. Sites in central and southern Europe were constructed at a similar date, but that corresponds to the middle or late Neolithic in those areas. Outside Europe, dolmens were built over a broad date range, and they continue to be constructed in some parts of the world—such as the island of Sumba, Indonesia—up to the present day.

The Breton word dolmen was originally used to describe the wide variety of stone monuments or, “megaliths” (meaning large stones), being discovered across the world. There is considerable diversity in those monument types, but they nevertheless share a number of common characteristics. All consist of a large capstone or capstones supported by a number of smaller upright stones. That collection of stones creates an enclosed chamber area. The chambers of dolmens can vary in both shape and size. Some are the size of small boxes, while others are tall and long enough for people to not only stand but also walk and move around inside them. When many dolmen sites were excavated, archaeologists determined that the chambers were often used for the burial of the dead. Moreover, it was not uncommon for many people to have been buried in those monuments and their bones to have been mixed together in a communal deposit. For that reason, dolmens are often referred to as chambered tombs, and archaeologists believe those collections of bones to be ancestral remains.

Because dolmen sites vary so significantly by region and history, archaeologists in many areas use the term dolmen only in a very generalized sense. Many prefer to use more-specific descriptive names. In Britain, for example, portal dolmen indicates that a monument exhibits a distinctive pair of stones, the portals, at the entrance to the chamber. Most sites called dolmens in Brittany are more precisely passage graves, so called because a passage leads to the chamber area.

One of the most-distinctive and extraordinary aspects of dolmen monuments is the massive size of the stones—particularly the capstone or capstones—used in their construction. The builders clearly chose what seem to have been the largest and chunkiest stones they could find, many of which were shaped before they were put in place. In some cases the builders chose to shape as capstones large boulders that had been moved to their resting place by glaciers. The capstone at Brownshill, Ireland, for example, weighs approximately 150 tonnes and is the biggest capstone in Ireland. Such a large stone would surely have commanded considerable prestige for the person who was able to sponsor such a feat of engineering. Some capstones seem to have been carefully quarried from outcrops nearby. Some—such as those in Locmariaquer, Brittany—incorporate as capstones the documented remains of menhirs (standing stones).

Much planning would have been required prior to the construction of a dolmen, and it seems likely that considerable numbers of people would have been required to gather together the necessary resources not only to build a site but also to feed the workforce. Although there is no direct evidence for how these sites were built, researchers assume that the builders used timber, rope, cattle, and a large number of people to maneuver the stones into place. For the most part, the dolmen builders seem to have known what they were doing, as many dolmens are still standing in the 21st century, but there are also a few sites—such as Garn Turne in Pembrokeshire, Wales—where dolmens very likely collapsed while being built. Those events would likely have had potentially life-threatening results as well as having the serious social implications of a failed monument build.

Archaeologists continue to debate whether dolmens, once built, were encased in a mound, or cairn. In some cases (e.g., in France) dolmens were clearly incorporated into large mounds of earth and stone, but in other areas the stone chambers were open to the elements, albeit sometimes enclosed by a small knee-high area of stones. That stone enclosure may have been built to reduce ease of access to the chamber by setting aside the immediate area as sacred. It is clear that some dolmens were used for burial, some of those over the course of hundreds of years. At Poulnabrone in County Clare, Ireland, for example, carbon-14 dating of bones indicated that burials took place over the course of about 600 years, from 3800 to 3200 bce. Whereas the deposition of human remains is common at the sites, archaeologists have also found such artifacts as pottery, animal bones, and hearths, indicating that dolmens were the sites of other activities, possibly including feasting. Unlike the burial event, the feasting took place outside the monument and likely was associated with burial rituals and commemoration of the ancestors. Yet some groups of dolmens contain no evidence of human remains. Whatever the particular purpose of their construction, dolmens are so distinctive in the landscape that their presence continued to fascinate even in the 21st century, as much as 7,000 years after they were built.