The Wonderful World of Megaliths

The Megalithic cultures of Europe (and elsewhere) decided that they, in their spare time would move massive rocks into a wonderful array of shapes and orders. Here is a quick overview of the various structures that these prehistoric peoples put up.

Dolmen

One of the most popular was a dolmen. A dolmen is a tomb that consists of a number of large rocks supporting a top table rock. They are found all over Europe. There are a number of great examples of Dolmens on the West Coast of Ireland, like the one pictured to the left.

Taula

A Taula is another table top structure similar to the dolmen. In fact the word Taula is table in Catalan. The Taulas are peculiar to the Talaiotic Culture that existed on the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain.

Newgrange in Ireland

Another popular megalithic structure was a passage grave. These burial chambers were often positioned so that the entrance would receive direct sunlight on important dates, like the sunrise of the winter solstice or the sunset of the equinox.

Cairn

Cairns are stacks of rocks that are found all over Europe. Sometimes they were used as decorations around other megalithic structures. Other times though they had a functional purpose as well. In England and Ireland they were strategically placed near forts to make conquering it that much more difficult. In Scandinavia they were put along the coast so that people could see them from the sea as guide posts. In Iceland, like the one pictured, they were basically prehistoric road markers.

Grand Menhir Brisé

A menhir is a single standing stone. In the Northwest of France alone there are over 1200 menhirs, with  Brittany having some of the most fascinating menhirs on earth. At the village of Locmariaquer in Brittany once stood the Grand Menhir Brisé or Great Broken Menhir. It was put up sometime around 4700 BC to decorate the Table des Marchand (Merchant's Table) passage grave. When it was erected it stood over 67 feet high and weighed over 280 tonnes. If that wasn't impressive enough, the stone was quarried and carried to the spot from a few kilometers away. Somehow though the menhir came crashing to earth around 4000 BC and broke into four pieces. Some archeologists think that it was deliberately pulled down, while others think that its tumble was caused by an earthquake.

Swedish Stone Ship

There was also the construction of a stone ship. Basically a stone ship was a group of menhirs arranged in a way that it looks like the outline of a ship. These types of structures were mainly found in Scandinavian countries, Germany and the Baltic States. The ships varied from only a few meters to massive like the Jelling Stone ship in Denmark which is over 1100 feet long. The Jelling Stone Ship is interesting because it combines a number of eras of construction. The mound and ship were originally a bronze age burial, but King Harald Bluetooth extended it and built two giant burial mounds in it for his mom and dad. The pictures of this from an ariel shot are fairly interesting and you can check them out here. Pictured to the right is a stone ship that gives a much clearer representation of what we're talking about. This stone ship is the largest in Sweden and dates to around 200 AD.

There a whole host of other megalithic structures like the tumuli or kurgans (large burial mounds), cromlechs (a burial site that looks a lot like dolmens combined with a stone circle that is Welsh in origin), stone rows (rows of single stones in straight order) and of course, the stone circle. The most famous of stone circles is Stonehenge and we'll save that for its own post.

The Bronocice Pot

There's a whole lot of different types of pot in this world. But none can compare to the Bronocice Pot. If you want a high on history, just have a gander at the Bronocice Pot. The Bronocice Pot comes down to us  from the Funnelbeaker Culture, which we'll discuss in the next Podcast, Neolithic Part II. The pot was found in Bronocice, Poland and was a major find for the Funnelbeakers that stretched from the Netherlands to the west, Scandinavia to the north (specifically Sweden, Denmark and Norway) and Poland to the east. But the heart of the Funnelbeaker Culture was in Germany and Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic). The Funnelbeaker Culture was defined by their distinctive pottery. The Bronocice Pot is a type of this pottery, but has importance because of its decorations.

The pot is decorated with what appears to be a wagon being pulled by some type of draught animal. It dates to some time between 3635 BC - 3370 BC, making it among the earliest drawings of a wheeled vehicle. This gives it a great status as a Neolithic invention. In the middle of the wagon drawing is a circular pot, that probably represents the harvest that the wagon is carrying. Basically, because of its early date, the Bronocice Pot deserves great granddaddy status in the evolution of vehicles, and all that that entails. The picture on top is the actual pot, in reconstructed form. The picture to the right is a rendition of the drawing of the earliest wagon. You can't tell by the drawing but it was likely a precursor to the ultimately cool 1967 Ford Country Squire. It probably had seats in the back so kids could sit and watch the cars come up behind it. Stationwagons should be brought back to save the American Auto industry. Who needs an efficient smart car when you can have the coolness of wood paneling?

Ten bucks says I'll get more clicks on this Neolithic post than any other

Modern Descendants of the Uralic Language groups mentioned
at the bottom. This is a blatant attempt at a bait-and-switch
marketing scheme.

For the ten-thirteen podcast listeners eagerly awaiting the next installment of the The History of Europe podcast allow me to ensure you that the Neolithic part one podcast will be coming soon. I had planned on recording it today and sending it out, but there is a party beneath my apartment and I can't get good quality sound at the moment. I'll try again tomorrow, but plan on getting both parts of the Neolithic podcast within the week. As I am unable to release a podcast today, I plan on unleashing a slew of prehistoric cultures that didn't make the cut onto the blog. Here is one such unleashed item (actually its two rolled into one)

The Pitted-Ware Culture and the Comb Ceramic Culture were precursors to the Chalcolithic Corded Ware Culture. This culture will get a whole lotta love on the Chalcolithic podcast, which may or may not be a multi-part podcast. But, for now we'll focus on the Neolithic Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic cultures that preceded it.

Pitted-Ware Sculpture example

The Pitted-Ware Culture lasted from roughly 3200 BC - 2300 BC in areas of Northeast Denmark, Southern Norway, Sweden and on the Åland Islands, a Swedish archipelago under the rule of the Finnish government. The culture is named "Pitted-Ware" because the pottery that they created had horizontal rows of pits or circles pressed into the pottery. Other than that this widespread Scandinavian Neolithic culture was tied together by their use of nets and propensity for hunting marine animals like seals, whales and porpoises. They used basically the same structure of tools, though their composition varied on what materials were readily available. 

The Comb Ceramic Culture was a bit more far-flung than the Pitted-Ware Culture. It stretched across the Scandinavian countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway and the islands of around these countries down into the Baltic Region of Poland and other Baltic states. The Narva Culture of Estonia was under the umbrella of this overarching culture status. We talked about the Narva in the Neolithic podcasts. It was a bit older than the Pitted-Ware culture and lasted a bit longer, ranging from around 4200 BC - 2000 BC before being taken over by the Corded Ware culture we'll spend some time on in the Chalcolithic podcast. 

This silly looking bike rack is located in Poland as a cultural
nod to the Comb-Ceramic Culture that existed there around
4000 BC. While this modern shaped comb probably wasn't
the exact prototype to the Comb Ceramic Culture, it was a
comb similar to this (on a smaller scale) that was used to
create the distinctive markings on this culture's pottery.

Like the Pitted-Ware Culture, the Comb Ceramic Culture was a hunter-gather group that made pottery. Its distinctive trait was lines made by what appear to be combs rather than the horizontal pits in the Pitted-Ware Culture. Other than that these two cultures were similar in their economical makeup. When the Comb Ceramic Culture was located near the sea they were maritime. When they were further inland they hunted. But, like the Pitted-Ware Culture they were nomadic and chased down their meals. They traveled around and built semi-nomadic settlements and stayed in oversized teepees. They made stone tools out of the locally abundant slate and quartz. When there was spare time they liked to paint in caves and make figurines. These figurines were similar to the Pitted-Ware culture in construction techniques but often depicted land animals like moose and deer, whereas the Pitted-Ware Culture depicted maritime animals like seals and porpoises in their statuary art.

These two scandinavian cultures get little to no play in the coming Neolithic podcasts, but shouldn't be written off in importance. They served as the basis for the far reaching and influential Corded Ware culture of the Chalcolithic. For this reason they are getting some love here on the blog.

Both the Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic culture likely spoke an early version of Uralic languages. Uralic languages have an incredibly large breadth of territory where their modern offshoots are spoken, including parts of Finland and Estonia (Finnic branch), Hungary (Hungarian branch) and places in Norway, Sweden and Finland that speak a local Sami language (Sami branch). There are a number of branches of the Uralic languages in Russia as well, including the Khanty, Mansi, Mari, Mordvinic and Samoyedic languages. In conclusion, the Pitted-Ware and Comb Ceramic Cultures have achieved boss status long after being taken into the wider Corded Ware Culture. But, not everyone has realized this boss status until now..

The Mighty Tasty Aurochs

Throughout the podcast series I plan on supplementing the episodes with some blog posts about some of the more interesting features of European history that I leave out of the episodes. I'm going to have to leave some things out for time concerns, so I'll try to make it up with these supplemental blogs.

An aurochs skeleton that dates to around 7500 BC. It
was found in Denmark along with another near full
skeleton. Notice the horns and how they point out. Those
were the horns that early modern humans had to deal with
in order to get a descent burger. Thank heavens for Five Guys.

On Episode 2 Paleolithic Europe, we mentioned the mighty tasty Aurochs. These guys are so fascinating that they deserve a blog post.  Aurochs were the ancestors to most of today's many species of domesticated cattle. They were truly massive animals, growing as tall as 5'11. Though, the northern Aurochs grew to be a bit larger than their southern cousins. They also weighed over 1500 lbs on average. But a number of specimens found put the weight of the beast at well over a ton and a British ton at that (2204 lbs, not the measly American ton of 2000 lbs).

If we were transported back in time to see an Aurochs we'd easily recognize it as a species of cow, but it had some major differences to today's varieties. First, the horns were enormous and why not? It had the muscle mass to support them. Might as well go big. The legs of the aurochs were skinnier than modern cows and longer too. This gave them a very broad look up front, sort of like a cartoon version of a bull.

How aurochs behaved is a bit of a mystery and causes some disagreement between scientists. Some think that aurochs basically behaved like modern cows and other creatures like Buffalo and Bison. Others think they might have been different and more solitary creatures. This line of thinking comes from observing the tail end of aurochs existence on earth. But, this could have been because of limited numbers and the loss of the wild open plains and forests they once roamed so freely in. Before domestication, the aurochs roamed all over Europe (excluding Ireland and Iceland) throughout Asia and into North Africa.

The taming of Aurochs would happen independently in various regions around the world. This can explain some of the wide varieties of cattle we have throughout Europe and Asia. The domestication began somewhere around 10,000 years ago in the Indian Subcontinent and around the same time in parts of the Near East. The taming of the Aurochs happened a little later around 6000 BC in the Caucasian Mountains and Mesopotamia.  Then the domestication would travel into other parts of Europe and slowly most of the wild aurochs were no longer wild.

The few surviving Aurochs found their movement restricted by civilization and climate change so they holed up in Lithuania, Moldavia, Transylvania, East Prussia, and Poland. Hunting of the last wild aurochs became an activity that would become limited. First, only nobles could hunt them and finally only the royal houses. The 1% only could enjoy the tasty hamburgers. But as the population still dwindled we see an early attempt at ecological activism. Kings hired people as gamekeepers to help the remaining aurochs survive. But it was too late. The population dwindled further and further until the last aurochs died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest in Poland. I joked on the podcast about the Swedes taking offense to this and invading Poland in response. The Swedes did invade Poland shortly the death of the last aurochs, but this was because of a combination of some uppity Polish Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants distrust of the Lithuanian-Polish rule and Swedish opportunism. However, in the looting that came out of the war the skull of the last aurochs found its way into the hands of the Swedes and remains in a Swedish museum to this day.

I keep referring to the aurochs as tasty and there is a reason for this. Obviously the kings and nobles wanted to keep all the meat to themselves and then tried to preserve it when it was running out. But the aurochs has been depicted throughout history.

 Here is a picture of some petroglyphs of the aurochs in a cave in Bourdeilles, France that date back some 18,000 years ago.

Here is a picture of the famous cave painting in Lascaux, France that date around 17,000 years ago. The aurochs were still prevalent enough when Julius Caesar was tromping around Gaul that he mentions them in his book The Gallic War.







Another reason I think that they must have been so tasty is that people have been trying to bring them back into existence since the 1920's. A couple of German brothers starting breeding aurochs descendants in the hope of being able to make an aurochswurst sandwich to enjoy with a bit of sauerkraut. It didn't quite work, but the resulting Heck Cattle does have some of aurochs' features.

Polish scientists are hoping to reconstruct aurochs from extracting DNA from the ancient remains of some of the aurochs they have in their possession. I don't believe there are any plans in Sweden to give them back the Jaktorów head. Another group of scientists have started the TaurOs project, a Danish effort to bring back the aurochs into existence. With any luck, we'll be able to sit down to an aurochs cheeseburger with our grandkids.