For many, the word ‘megaliths’ is intimately associated with the stone circles of the British Isles – not least due to the overwhelming space that Stonehenge takes up in the layman’s mind when people think about ancient stone monuments. Those with a bit more knowledge might also think of France, specifically the amazing stone rows of Carnac, or they may have heard the recent news about a massive megalithic complex being discovered in Spain.But the surprising truth is that cultures right around the world, from Africa to the Pacific, have created megalithic sites.
The oldest written record of the word “megalithic” dates from 1849, used by the British antiquarian Algernon Herbert in his work Cyclops Christianus; Or, An Argument to Disprove the Supposed Antiquity of the Stonehenge and Other Megalithic Erections in England and Britanny. Megalith simply means big stone, and megalithic monuments are, therefore, monuments constructed of big stones.
So far as descriptive names go, it does the job, but it is not wonderfully illuminating nor specific, though a key component of megalithic monuments is the fact that they were constructed without the use of mortar. The majority of megaliths were set in place somewhere between 4,000 BCE (the end of the New Stone Age or Neolithic period) and 500 CE (the end of what we call Ancient History), though there are plenty of exceptions. Nevertheless, most of us understand that, when talking about megaliths, we’re typically dealing with “prehistoric” (another not-quite-specific-enough 19th-century antiquarian word) monuments.
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