Photos of Wonderful Neolithic Standing Stone Dolmen & Quoits – Intriguing Neolithic burial chambers from Europe. Photos by photographer Paul E Williams
Photo Collections of Neolithic Standing Stone Dolmen & Quoits
photos of Neolithic burial chambers known as dolmen or quoits that are single chamber burial chambers.
The burial of the dead was an important ritual to prehistoric people and burial tombs have been identified in Western Europe dating back to around 5000 BC.
One of the commonest type of single chamber megalith tomb is known as a dolmen or in the British Isles is known as a quoit .
Dolmen consist of upright stones capped by a large stone and can be found built in the same way as far apart as in the British Isles and India.
The standing stones look odd today and seem to have no purpose. To make sense of them you have to imagine them as a chamber at the centre of an earth mound that covered them. Over the millennia the earth has been washed away to leave the dolmen standing stones.
It has been assumed that dolmen were burial chambers but the lack of human remains in them suggests that they may have had a slightly more macabre use.
It is becoming evident that neolithic people worshipped or at least venerated their ancestors. As was the common practise of American Indians, it seems that bodies would be left to decay in the open or possibly in dolmen, then the bones would be collected and kept by the relations of the deceased.
In the British isles dolmen are known as quoits. Before archaeologists the existence of such large megalithic stone constructions was hard to explain. A myth grew that the dolmen were the result of giants playing the game of quoits. The game is played by throwing rings over upright stakes. In this case myth had it that the giants threw giant rocks on top of upright standing stones, and so the dolmen became known as quoits.