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Updated: June 5, 2025
Such graves are more common in Kentucky than Ohio. No article, except the skeletons, was found in these graves; and the skeletons resembled very much the present race of Indians." The first one opened was an oval mound about 20 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 7 feet high. In the interior of this I found a dolmen or quadrilateral wall about 10 feet long, 4 feet high, and 4-1/2 feet wide.
It is a great pity that this chapel, probably one of the oldest religious structures in the kingdom, was not preserved. Above the Stone Age burial was a dolmen of the Bronze Age; and above this were layers that told of Romano-British civilisation. But the antiquities of this district really need a book to themselves.
One dolmen at Locmariaker, for instance, is known as LE TOMBEAU DU VIEILLARD, a covered avenue at Saint Gildas is LE CHAMP DU TOMBEAU, and farther on a pathway leading to a ruined megalith is known as the CHEMIN DU TOMBEAU. The Abbe Harvard speaks of a remarkable monolith known as LA PIERRE DU CHAMP DOLENT, and another CHAMP DOLENT is met with near Rheims, whilst a group of monuments near Trehontereuc is called the JARDIN DES TOMBES, and the upright stones of Auvergne are known by the characteristic name of the PLOUROUSES.
There is no positive evidence showing that bronze swords were in use, though grounds exist for supposing, as has been already noted, that they were employed at a period not much anterior to the commencement of dolmen building, which seems to have been about the sixth or seventh century before Christ.
So far the Scottish and the Portuguese fakers have hit on parallel lines of fraud. Meanwhile I know of no archaeologists except Portuguese archaeologists, who have seen the objects from the dolmen, and of no Portuguese archaeologist who disputes their authenticity. So there the matter rests. The parallelism appears to me to be noticeable.
The dolmen contained no metal objects, and there was no trace of metal on any of the bones. At the same period the two rites appear to have been practised simultaneously in Armorica, but there incineration was the dominant custom. In one hundred and forty-five megalithic monuments supposed to date from the Neolithic period, seventy-two give proof of incineration and twenty of inhumation only.
The centre stone, or mawkni, of one of these rows was surmounted by a carved stone covering shaped like a hat, but having a rim with indented edges, the intention being evidently to represent a crown. This stone crown was riveted to the top of the large centre stone. All the stones, including the mawkynthei, or dolmen, have been very neatly hewn. They appear to be of granite.
The fact is that the word 'dolmen-like, which has become current coin in archæological phraseology, is a question-begging epithet. The Maltese cells are not like dolmens at all, they are either trilithons or tables resting on a pillar. They are always open to the front, and instead of the rough unhewn block which should cover a dolmen they are roofed with a well-squared slab.
In the Saint-Germain Museum are preserved the remains of spoons from the bed of the Seine, and in the collections of England are fragments of bone taken from beneath the West-Kennet dolmen, which were all probably employed for extracting marrow.
We may even, by straining a point, admit the idea that a large cist developed into a dolmen, but when in districts separated by enormous distances we see monuments with the wall pierced with a circular opening or combining an interior crypt with an external mound and dolmen, it is impossible to look upon these close resemblances as the result of an accidental coincidence, and equally impossible to fail to conclude that the men whose funeral rites were remarkable for such close similarity belonged to the same race.
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