Rough Stone Monuments and Their BuildersPeet, T. Eric (Thomas Eric)
History
Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders
Peet, T. Eric (Thomas Eric)
Megalithic monuments; Prehistoric peoples
Another tomb in the same district, that of Mane-er-Hroeck, was intact
when discovered in 1863. It contained within its chamber a hoard of 101
axes of fibrolite and jadeite, 50 pebbles of a kind of turquoise known
as _callais_, pieces of pottery, flints, and a peculiarly fine celt of
jadeite together with a flat ring-shaped club-head of the same stone.
The tomb was concealed by a huge oval mound more than 100 yards in
length. The famous Mont S. Michel is an artificial mound containing a
central megalithic chamber and several smaller cists, some of which held
cremated bodies.
[Illustration: FIG. 11. Chambered mound at Fontenay-le-Marmion,
Normandy. (After Montelius, _Orient und Europa_.)]
A very remarkable mound in Calvados (Fig. 11) was found to contain no
less than twelve circular corbelled chambers, each with a separate
entrance passage. The megalithic tombs of Brittany all belong to the
late neolithic period, and contain tools and arrow-heads of flint, small
ornaments of gold, _callais_, and pottery which includes among its forms
the bell-shaped cup.
In Central and South France the _allees couvertes_ are mostly of a
semi-subterranean type, i.e. they are cut in the ground and merely
roofed with slabs of stone. The most famous is that of the Grotte des
Fees near Arles (Fig. 12), in which a passage (_a_) with a staircase at
one end and two niches (_b b_) in its sides leads into a narrow
rectangular chamber (_c_). The total length is nearly 80 feet. Another
tomb of the same type, La Grotte du Castellet, contained over a hundred
skeletons, together with thirty-three flint arrow or spear-heads, one of
which was stuck fast in a human vertebra, a bell-shaped cup, axes of
polished stone, beads and pendants of various materials, 114 pieces of
_callais_, and a small plaque of gold.
On the plateau of Ger near the town of Dax are large numbers of mounds,
some of which contain cremated bodies in urns and others megalithic
tombs. Bertrand saw in this a cemetery of two different peoples living
side by side. But it has since been shown that the cremation mounds
belong to a much later period than those which contain megalithic
graves. In these last the skeletons were found seated around the walls
of the chamber accompanied by objects of flint and other stone, beads of
_callais_, and small gold ornaments.
[Illustration: FIG. 12. Plan and section of La Grotte des Fees, Arles,
France (_Materiaux pour l'histoire de l'homme_, 1873).]
[Illustration: FIG. 13. The so-called dolmen-deity, from the tombs of
the Petit Morin. (After de Baye.)]
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