Korea holds about 40 percent of the world's dolmens, and Sumba still builds them
A dolmen is simple to describe: a few standing stones holding up one huge flat slab. Europe's oldest are about 7,000 years old, yet on the Indonesian island of Sumba people still raise around 100 a year as family graves. The densest clusters anywhere, though, lie on the Korean Peninsula.
Most European dolmens date from the Late Neolithic, between 4000 and 3000 BCE. Many were once buried under a mound of earth or small stones that has since worn off, leaving the bare frame. Builders sometimes wedged small pad-stones under the capstone to level it. Human bones and objects often turn up nearby, but radiocarbon dates on remains cannot prove when the stones were actually set.
The word came into archaeology in 1796, when Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne wrote it as dolmin. The Oxford English Dictionary thinks he garbled the Cornish tolmên, and it has since displaced the Welsh-derived cromlech in English. Local names are vivid: German Hünengrab and Dutch hunebed both mean a giant's grave, Basques credited them to a race of giants called the jentilak, and Catalan folk names call them the table, chest or hut of the Moor, the thief, the devil or Roland. The Korean goindol means propped stone.
Korea built them from the Bronze Age into the early Iron Age, leaving roughly 40,000, lined up along rivers on sedimentary plains or following the slope in hilly country. The Gochang, Hwasun and Ganghwa groups, together holding over 1,000, gained World Heritage status in 2000. In the Levant, along the Jordan Rift Valley and in Galilee, dolmens belong to an unrelated Early Bronze Age tradition clustered near settlements of 3700 to 3000 BCE, wherever the rock allowed huge slabs to be quarried.
In south India, Iron Age dolmens near the Pambar River were made of neatly dressed granite. The lower ones, 70 to 90 cm high, seem to have held people of high status, while urn fragments nearby suggest commoners were buried in pots; taller raised-roof dolmens may even have been lived in. On Sumba the tradition never ended, and the village of Wainyapu has about 1,400.
Source: Dolmen
