From 'The Monument Builders'

From The Monument Builders. (Series: The Emergence of Man). Edited by Robert Werich. New York: Time-Life, 1979, pp. 72-73.

Where the Beaker People came from forms the subject of endless debate. Some archeologists believe they originated in Spain, others think they may have come from the South of France, still others look to central Europe, the Russian steppes or North Africa. At one time it was argued they were a warrior aristocracy, but archeology has produced no evidence of warfare to support such thinking.

Whoever they were, they seem to have been a remarkably adaptive people. At first they lived apart from their neighbors, "social discrete if geographically mingled," as the English archeologist D. I. Clarke puts it. Nevertheless, there must have been some form of social mingling sooner or later, for after a few generations all trace of the Beakers as an apparently independent group disappears, and their remains, physical as well as material, become indistinguishable from those of the neolithic farmers who took over their characteristic bell-shaped beakers.

One thing, however, can be said with certainty about the Beaker People: somehow they were connected with the introduction of metallurgy into Western Europe, and therefore they were harbingers of a decisive change in the pattern of human life.

The coming of the Copper Age greatly altered the society of Western Europe, as did the later Bronze Age. Slowly the classes of society became more stratified, with the rich being clearly separated from the masses. This change is evidenced in the megaliths. The communal graves, like the passage graves and chamber tombs of earlier days, gradually gave way to megalithic tombs in which a single man or woman, evidently a person of importance, was buried amid heaps of valuable ornaments and utensils of amber, bronze and gold.

The alterations of society wrought by the introduction of metal into Europe were considerably, but they may have been concentrated in a rather narrow band at the top level of society. Life for most Europeans was probably not very different from what it had been in neolithic times. Copper and bronze were rare, too expensive to use in the ordinary farming, herding, hunting and fishing on which the daily life of the community depended. So these activities no doubt went on as before, with implements of wood, bone or stone. In fact, craftsmanship in stone reached amazing heights at this time. Stone axes, many found in megalithic tombs, are exact replicas of copper ones, down to the seam-line marking where the halves of the mold joined in casting.

During the Early Bronze Age, men gradually stopped building monumental tombs and great ceremonial centers and started to bury even their illustrious dead under less pretentious barrows or in flat graves like those in modern cemeteries. In Western and temperate northern Europe the megalith-building period had lasted 3,000 years and covered a wide variety of peoples and places. It is always dangerous to generalize but it seems safe to draw a few conclusions about

the quality of life during those three long millennia.

Life on the whole was undoubtedly simple. Spellbound by spectacular feats like moving 300-ton boulders or the accomplishment of packing cattle into frail skin-covered boats to cross miles of unknown water, prehistorians have tended to overemphasize the strains and labors of megalithic man. He was indeed capable of spurts and starts of enormous physical energy, and he could work for extended periods of time if he needed to, inching the giant boulders along miles of country. But there is no reason to think that he spent all or even a majority of his time on such projects. He was in many ways a man of leisure. The climate was salubrious, the land was fertile. The hardy herds of cattle and swine more or less took care of themselves. If crops occasionally failed, wild game was always within reach, and edible herbs and berries grew wild in the forest clearings. If a house burned down, a new one could be put up with the aid of friendly neighbors.

Such an existence does not jibe with the commonly held conceptions of prehistoric people forever struggling with nature in order to survive. Far from being exhausted by the struggle with nature, the megalith builders seem to have achieved a remarkably happy balance with their surroundings. They were apparently a healthy, moderately prosperous and generally peaceful people, earning their living from the soil without too much strain and with ample time left over for constructing monuments and taking part in ceremonies around them. They were open to innovation but faithful to tradition, maintaining a stable way of life for some 3,000 years, with a slowly increasing standard of living but no abrupt revolutionary changes until the introduction of metal.

Perhaps it was not quite as rosy as all that. But as man moved forward into the bright and often cruel light of history, there remained in the recesses of his mind, for a while at least, a vague recollection of a time when he lived more at harmony with his environment than he ever would again.

The poet Hesiod, writing on mainland Greece in the Eighth Century B.C., hundreds of years after the final megalith had been built in Europe, could look around and see little but woe – overworked soils, deforested mountains, people crowded into unhealthy cities and slaughtering each other wholesale over parcels of land and handfuls of barren metal. Nature’s bounty could only be reaped by year-long drudgery, and man’s hand was raised everywhere against his brother. The degenerate present of Hesiod’s day contrasted vividly in the poet’s mind with legends that had come down to him of a past when men had enjoyed a life that was open and easy and peaceful. He called it the Golden Age:

They lived as if they were gods,
Their hearts free from all sorrow…
When they died, it was as if they fell asleep…

The fruitful grainland yielded its harvest to them of its own accord…
While they at their pleasure
Quietly looked after their works,
In the midst of good things…

While Hesiod may have been seeing the past through a golden haze, his vision may well have contained elements of prosaic fact. Perhaps in the long course of history, megalithic times were indeed man’s closest approach to a golden age.

The people who built the megaliths for all eternity built their own homes of perishable wood, mud and reeds. Since fire, rain and rot have removed most traces of these less durable structures, it is more difficult to find out about the places where neolithic men resided in earthly life than it is to learn about those they provided for the hereafter.

Still, some clues remain. Some have turned up in surprising discoveries of the remains of entire settlements; some come from scattered fragments. Others can be deduced by analogy to societies that today live at the neolithic level in such areas as New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands. Taken together, all these clues give a picture of human life in Europe between 4500 and 1500 B.C. it is a picture of men who farmed and fished and hunted, who manufactured stone tools and traded them far and wide. Evidently their society was egalitarian: certainly they held religious beliefs and engaged in rituals from time to time.

Of the many thousands of sites where neolithic man lived, only a few survive. One of the best examples is at Skara Brae, in the Orkney islands off the northwest coast of Scotland, where a whole village of 10 houses was uncovered in 1850 by a storm from the sand that had drifted over it. When archeologists completed nature’s excavation in 1928, the village was found to have been untouched since 1500 B.C.; except for the roofs it was structurally intact. And the reason it survived in such near-pristine condition was that – like the megaliths that had been erected in the same era – it was built of stone. Its founders, who dared rough seas to reach this distant, desolate place and settled down to a rude life as herders and fishermen, found little timber on the island to build with. But the seashore was covered with shale, which makes an idea construction material because it breaks off into long, thin, sturdy flakes. They used this flagstone to build houses in the shape of the wooden cabins they probably were accustomed to on the mainland.

All the houses at Skara Brae have stone walls 10 feet high. The roofs – now fallen to the floors – were made of whale jawbone, which probably supported hides. Outdoors, the walls of the houses were surrounded by the accumulated refuse of daily life – fish, animal bones and sea shells. This rubbish may have served as effective insulation against the fierce Atlantic gales and provided a snug, if smelly, interior. The remains of this debris gave the archeologists who excavated Skara Brae ample evidence of the means by which the people sustained themselves – cattle and sheep herding, fishing, gathering shellfish along the rocky shores.

The Tinkinswood tomb is a roughly rectangular chamber, walled and roofed with limestone slabs and set at the eastern end of a barrow some 130 feet long. One archeologist estimates that it would have taken more than 50 able-bodied men one year to put up this impressive edifice: thus Tinkinswood must have been a community of considerable size. So this and other megalithic burial tombs raise a fascinating question: where were the other members of the community buried when they died? Unless, as seems unlikely, every last human suddenly took off, leaving a ghost town and a ghostly megalith behind, most of the people in the community must have been dumped into shallow graves when they died, or left to rot on the surface of the ground. In any event, since there is only this one megalith in the immediate neighborhood, most of the people in the settlement must not have been so honored when they died.

It would seem, therefore, that there were some class distinctions in early megalithic society. Some people seem to have merited having their remains put into splendid monuments, and others did not. Certain of the privileged dead were expected to pass on, with the help of sacrifices and grave offerings, to a fairer land in another life – perhaps to such a place as the Fortunate Isles [which occur in both Irish and Greek myth], where heroes were rewarded for a strenuous life on earth by perpetual ease thereafter.

What entitled a neolithic settler to such a privileged afterlife? Not achievement certainly, for there are infants in some of these tombs. Presumably it was a hereditary privilege, belonging to the family of some renowned ancestor who had been able to endow all his offspring with a special divine blessing, like Father Abraham in the Bible. Or it could be that some families labored to provide tombs for themselves and their descendants, while others did not. A study made at the chamber tomb of Lanhill, in Wiltshire in southern England, showed strong resemblances among the bones of the nine individuals buried there. Seven of the skulls have a rare bone formation known as the Wormian ossicle, a growth known to be hereditary. It seems probable that Lanhill was a family vault.

The question then arises: if there was favored treatment in death, did it follow favored treatment in

life? Did the families who had the right to a megalithic tomb and a glorious afterlife enjoy any special favors while they were passing through the earthly phase of their existence? The evidence is ambiguous, but in general the answer appears to be no.

In the tombs at Xemxija on Malta lie the bones of a number of young men who were apparently healthy enough at death but whose bones lack the deep grooves caused by the attachment of powerful muscles. Were these young men gilded youths who had nothing to do but loll around while others toiled to put up towering tombs for their precious bones?

If so, they are the exceptions. And whatever the evidence of the tombs, the evidence of the few surviving dwelling places elsewhere on the Continent indicates an egalitarian society in which no one lived on a grander scale than his neighbors. The lake houses of Switzerland are all about the same size and furnished in about the same way. At Barkjaer, in East Jutland, the settlement is composed of two long parallel wooden buildings, each divided into 28 identical single-room apartments, all as orderly and uniform as a barracks. So are the stone houses at Skara Brae. Some of the walrus hunters and sheepherders of Skara Brae may have ended up in the magnificent passage grave of Maes Howe nine miles away; but while they lived, they fared no better than their neighbors in that inhospitable land.

A basically egalitarian society, then, in which certain elements had more prestige than others but no one person had out-of-the-ordinary material comforts, would have been the ideal community for erecting megalithic monuments. For the task must have demanded some effort from every able-bodied member of the populace. It was once assumed that large-scale public works demanded a rigidly hierarchical society, with an authoritarian government controlling a cowed population of slaves. Fanciful writers have described aristocrats of the Beaker People or other invaders imposing their rule on the backward native populations and dragooning them into forced labor, with overseers cracking their whips. Kings of Wessex are depicted superintending vast armies of slaves to build Stonehenge, just as the pharaohs of Egypt did to build the pyramids. This is all moonshine. A king in Wessex – if there were kings in Wessex in prehistoric times, and there is no conclusive evidence that there were – would have found it hard to keep a big labor force under his rule unless he imprisoned his workers, because they could simply wander off. In Egypt the pharaoh’s subjects had little choice: if they did not want to work on the pyramids all they could do was flee to the desert, where they surely would starve or die or thirst. But anyone who did not want to work on Stonehenge had only to take off with this wife, a sow, an ax and a bag of seed – off into the trackless forest to join another settlement or start one of his own.

More likely, it was not force but a sense of community that called forth the tremendous efforts of the megalith builders. These monuments can be seen as the spontaneous outpouring of a whole people’s energy, with everyone – young and old, men and women – pitching in. The work must have gone forward in an atmosphere of mass enthusiasm and freely accepted discipline, with every citizen of the community working on the project – possibly under the guidance of priests or master builders – and proud to be contributing to a monument that would stand forever to the glory of his people and his gods.

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