Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
But, as to our Dumbuck things, the Clyde forger went to Portugal and forged there; or the Clyde forger came from Portugal; or forging wits coincided fairly well, in Portugal and in Scotland, as earlier, at Volosova and Breonio. In Portugalia, a Portuguese archaeological magazine, edited by Don Ricardo Severe, appeared an article by the Rev. Father Jose Brenha on the dolmens of Pouco d'Aguiar.
We have already spoken of the calaite found beneath the dolmens of Brittany, and we may add now that it has also been found in the caves of Portugal and beneath the megalithic monuments of the south of France. Commerce developed rapidly during Neolithic times, and, as far as we can make out from traces left, its course was from the southeast to the northwest.
Over the whole surface of this tumbled plain rise, at intervals, great masses of rock, some natural, but others artificially up-tilted cromlechs and dolmens, menhirs and cairns whitened by lichen scrawls, giving them often in uncertain light the effect of so many undecipherable inscriptions, written in a long-forgotten tongue.
Cromlechs are circles of upright stones often surrounding dolmens or tumuli. Sometimes they form single circles, and at others two, three, or even seven separate enclosures. They are common in Algeria, Sweden, and Denmark, and in the last-named country two kinds are distinguished: the LANGDYSSERS, which form an ellipse, and the RUNDYSSERS which form a perfect circle.
A dolmen in Wales is his quoit; the circle at Penrith is his round table, and that of Caermarthen is his park. Dolmens in India are often "stones of the monkeys," and in France there are "wolves' altars," "wolves' houses," and "wolves' tables."
In all three we see signs of the typical arrangement of elliptical areas one behind another, and in the finest of the three the curved façade and the paved court which lies before it are still preserved. It was for a long time believed that there were no dolmens in Malta. Professor Tagliaferro has been able to upset this belief by discovering two, one near Musta and the other near Siggewi.
The dead in the first ages were given the caves in which they had lived, but they began to press out the living, to monopolise all caves, and afterwards artificial dwellings were reared to receive them, stone structures, dolmens, that were heaped over with earth, to make them resemble their former subterranean habitations.
To Broca, the resemblance between the dolmens of Europe, Africa, and even of America proves but one thing the similarity of the aspirations and powers of all men. Everywhere, and at every time, men have aimed, in their monuments, not only at durability, but at the expression of force and of power.
Some archaeologists are of opinion that the openings in certain dolmens were used for throwing in the bones of the dead who successively went to join their ancestors. In many of the Long Barrows of England the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell; the space was too narrow to hold the complete body, so that before inhumation the flesh must have been separated from the bones.
Dolmens of a most primitive kind "exist side by side with stone chambers of highly finished masonry in circumstances which suggest contemporaneous construction" so that "the type evidently furnishes little or no criterion of age," and, moreover, local facilities must have largely influenced the method of building.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking