For some reason, humans want to take long, narrow stones and stand them up straight. The recent stir caused by publicity from National Geographic about the 11,600-year-old temple at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey makes this tendency more, rather than less puzzling.
The biggest Gobekli Tepe standing stones are 18 feet long and weigh 16 tons. Later, in the dolmen period, humans using the same technology -- that is, no metal, no wheels, no draft animals -- moved stones as heavy as 170 tons in China. But after the first few tons, it's just a matter of organizing more people. It's the idea of doing it in the first place that is so weird.
In 1985, Roger Joussaume, a French archaeologist, produced "Dolmens for the Dead," a comprehensive survey, livened up by his astringent remarks about the buffoons who dress as Druids and caper around Stonehenge or write books claiming that the stones were moved by creatures from outer space.
Besides poking more fun at the nitwits than is customary in English-language scholarly books, Joussaume took pains to consider what "dolmen" means and to elucidate the theoretical difficulties in studying these rocks.
One of the most interesting essays is his comparison of what we know about dolmen-building in Madagascar, where it still goes on, with what archaeologists might be able to make of the rocks if there were no informants to explain what motivated their creation.
The Malagasy practices today may be more complicated than what went on 7,000 years ago, since they require prompt burial in the clan tomb; but if the corpse is far away, the alternatives involve temporary burials, or, if that is not possible, defleshing the corpse and at least delivering the long bones homes.
Joussaume admits there would be no way to recapture the practice from archaeology, just as no one can guess why some dolmens in western Europe contained one human ear bone, but no other bones.
More usually, however, dolmens -- a word Joussaume finds inadequate but used in his title anyway -- were collective tombs. In fact, in a technical sense, he would restrict the idea to collective burials, and treat single burials, even if covered with large stones, as something else.
The Gobekli Tepe stones were carefully worked and elaborately carved. This was not the case 6,000 years later. Dolmens are found in Europe -- the earliest anywhere perhaps are those in either Portugal or Brittany -- and north Africa, Ethiopia and parts of central Africa, the Caucasus, southwest Asia, India, east Asia and Columbia.
They are much alike, though minutely subdivided by the scientists, and while it seems improbable, at least most of the ones in Eurasia seem to have been built by people who knew what other dolmen builders were doing, even thousands of miles away.
The practice of cutting a porthole into the side of one of the casing stones seems to show that. Although, on the whole Joussaume is skeptical of diffusionist explanations.
On the other hand, he has not a word to say about why some people didn't build dolmens. They are found in northern Italy and at the very heel of the Italian boot, but not in between. It cannot be for lack of stones.
ISBN-13: 978-0801421563
ISBN-10: 080142156X
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