Europe holds more than 35,000 prehistoric structures built from giant stones
From Sweden to the Mediterranean, over 35,000 megalithic monuments dot Europe, and the tradition is far older than Stonehenge. Carved pillars at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey date to around 9000 BC, and a 12-metre stone lying 40 m under the sea off Sicily may date to around 7400 BC.
The word is surprisingly recent. The antiquarian Algernon Herbert coined it in 1849 while writing about Stonehenge, joining the Greek for great and stone. It covers single boulders and arrangements of shaped rocks alike, built mostly from the Neolithic through the Copper Age and into the Bronze Age, with a few older Mesolithic examples. Contrary to a common assumption, the best-known megaliths are not tombs.
The vocabulary is rich. A menhir is a lone standing stone; a dolmen is a stone table, a broad slab propped on uprights and usually buried under an earth mound with a chamber inside. A cist is a small buried stone box for the dead. Alignments set stones in rows or spirals, and the Carnac stones in Brittany number in the thousands. Across Europe the most frequent form is the portal tomb, known locally by names such as hunebed in the Netherlands and anta in Portugal, though archaeologists still debate whether burial was its main purpose. Passage graves, with a long corridor leading into a chamber under a round mound, come next; Newgrange in Ireland and Maes Howe in Orkney are famous examples.
The dates sketch a slow spread. Standing stones may have gone up at Almendres near Évora in Portugal around 6000 BC, Barnenez in Brittany around 4800 BC, and Nabta Playa in southern Egypt around 4500 BC. Radiocarbon dating points to northwest France as the oldest megalithic region in Europe, while Malta's temples rose between about 3600 and 3200 BC.
The stone circle at Stonehenge belongs to the peak of the Bell-beaker culture around 2500 BC, when the Neolithic gave way to copper. By around 1200 BC, after the Bronze Age Collapse, the tradition had faded across the Mediterranean, though Egypt kept building with huge stones into the Iron Age.
Source: Megalith
