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In South-East Spain the brothers Siret have found corridor-tombs in which the chamber is cut in the rock surface and roofed with slabs; the entrance passage becomes a slope or a staircase. Here we have a parallel to the Giants' Graves of Sardinia, which are built usually of stone blocks on the surface, but occasionally are cut in the solid rock.
These wedge-shaped structures are of remarkable interest, for exactly the same broadening of the west end is found in Scandinavia, in the Hünenbetter of Holland, in the corridor-tombs of Portugal, and in the dolmens of the Deccan in India. In some Irish tombs the corridor leads to a well-defined chamber.
Thus in simple and primitive types of building such as the dolmen it is most rare to find dry masonry, but in the advanced corridor-tombs of Ireland, the Giants' Graves and nuraghi of Sardinia, and in the 'temples' of Malta this technique is largely used, often in combination with the upright slab system.
Belgium possesses several true dolmens, of which the best known is that called La Pierre du Diable on the right bank of the Meuse. Near Lüttich are two simple corridor-tombs, each with a round hole in one of the end-slabs and a small portico outside it. France contains large numbers of megalithic monuments. Of dolmens and corridor-tombs no less than 4458 have been recorded.
These early corridor-tombs are evidently not the work of the Ainu, the aborigines of Japan, but of the Japanese invaders who conquered them. These latter do not seem to have brought the idea of megalithic building with them, as their earlier tombs are simple mounds. As no dolmen has yet been found in Japan we cannot at present derive the corridor-tomb there from it.
At Carrowmore, Sligo, there seems to have been a veritable cemetery of dolmen-tombs, each of which has one or more circles around it, the outermost being 120 feet in diameter. The tombs in these Carrowmore circles were not always simple dolmens, but often corridor-tombs of more or less complicated types. Their excavation has not given very definite results.
Most of them lie east and west, and are broader at the west. In the eastern slab there is often a hole about 2 feet in diameter. Near Tsîl are several corridor-tombs of simple type. Each consists of a long rectangular chamber with only one cover-slab, that being at the west end. In a well-known example of this type at Kosseir there is a hole in one of the two uprights which support the cover.
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