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Updated: June 18, 2025
Here the tombs lie on the side of a steep hill. They consist of dolmens often surrounded by stone circles from 25 to 33 feet in diameter. The cover-slabs of the dolmens usually rest on single uprights, and never on built walls. Several of the graves excavated contained more than one body, one yielding as many as seven.
Montelius in his excellent Orient und Europa says, "In Europe at this time dwelt Aryans, but the Syrians and Sudanese cannot be Aryans," the inference being, of course, that the European dolmens were built by a different race from that which built those of Syria and the Sudan.
The dolmens, CELLA, and GANGRABEN in Germany, and the barrows in England, appear to bear witness to the prevalence of a similar custom in those countries; and we find the same idea perpetuated even when cremation became general. At Alba, in Latium, at Marino, near Albano, at Vetulonia and Corneto-Tarquinia were discovered urns with doors, windows, and a roof imitating human dwellings.
"So that the only foul play I can see is, that my master shoved the fellow over after he had stabbed him, instead of leaving him to stand upright there, like one of your Cornish Dolmens, till his flesh should fall off his bones." Hereward saw the effect of Martin's words, and burst out in Danish likewise.
Under the name of megalithic monuments we include TUMULI, DOLMENS, CROMLECHS, MENHIRS, and COVERED AVENUES. It may at first sight appear strange to include tumuli amongst stone monuments, but they almost always enclose a dolmen, a cist, or a crypt communicating with the outside by a covered passage.
Dolmens of simple type are not common in England, though they occur with comparative frequency in Wales, where the best known are the so-called Arthur's Quoit near Swansea, the dolmen of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire, and that of Plas Newydd on the Menai Strait: in Anglesey they are quite common.
VII. Miscellaneous. Specimens should be collected and the site mapped. Dolmens. Frequent east of Jordan; rare, though not unknown, in Western Palestine. Should be measured, photographed, described, and mapped. Rock-cuttings of various kinds, which should be measured, planned, and mapped. Often associated with cisterns.
When so summoned, the Kurumba must pass the night by the dolmens alone, and I have seen one who had been called from his present dwelling for the morning ceremony, sitting after dark on the capstone of a dolmen, with heels and hams drawn together and chin on knees, looking like some huge ghostly fowl perched on the mysterious stone." Mr. Anthrop.
We need not record the existence of dolmens, or table-stones, the remains of burial mounds, which have been washed away by denudation, nor of what the French folk call alignements, or lines of stones, which have suffered like other megalithic monuments. Barrows or tumuli are still plentiful, great mounds of earth raised to cover the prehistoric dead. But many have disappeared.
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.
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