Stone-Age Giants

The trail of rocks: from portal tombs to graves and their builders

What was it that motivated the people who started erecting enormous stone monuments about 5500 years ago? Did these structures made of megaliths, in other words large unhewn blocks of stone, serve as burial sites, as meeting places, or were they simply intended to act as landmarks in the broad open landscape? Or did they have multiple purposes?

These structures, that can be found throughout northern and western Europe, including the north of Germany, are the topic being investigated by the research programme “Early Monumentalism and Social Differentiation” by researchers at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel and the German Archaeological Institute in Frankfurt.

The researchers involved in this project assume that when people began building these impressive structures, this must have been accompanied by a fundamental change in their way of life and the way they interacted with each other. Their perceptions of life after death and the related rites, which they followed when burying their dead, changed just as did the exchange of goods and commodities between individual communities as well as the rules and hierarchies that governed how people interacted. All of these upheavals were the driving forces that suddenly made people able to build enormous burial sites out of gigantic boulders and dig deep ditches with palisades in order to mark the sites that were significant to them.

The cooperation between researchers from entirely different branches of research is crucial for them to be able to answer the questions addressed. First of all they need to select the sites and conduct detailed field studies to record the evidence that is to be found. Then they can begin the laborious laboratory work, which will involve geologists, biologists and chemists analysing the samples taken. Only then will the social scientists and humanists be able to start evaluating the results, in order to answer the original questions about how people who lived 5500 years ago interacted with each other.







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