Short note of megaliths
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What is the most strikingly common feature of prehistoric cultures, from the icy fjords of Norway to the tropical plains of Tamil Nadu?
All of them, seemingly independently, struck upon the idea of erecting massive stone structures during the same era in history. These monuments—yes, these are the earliest surviving man-made monuments we know of—are called megaliths, derived from the Latin mega (large) and lith (stone).
Megaliths were constructed either as burial sites or commemorative (non-sepulchral) memorials. The former are sites with actual burial remains, such as dolmenoid cists (box-shaped stone burial chambers), cairn circles (stone circles with defined peripheries) and capstones (distinctive mushroom-shaped burial chambers found mainly in Kerala). The urn or the sarcophagus containing the mortal remains was usually made of terracotta. Non-sepulchral megaliths include memorial sites such as menhirs. (The line separating the two is a bit blurry, since remains have been discovered underneath otherwise non-sepulchral sites, and vice versa.)
Taken together, these monuments lend these disparate peoples the common traits of what we know as megalithic culture, one which lasted from the Neolithic Stone Age to the early Historical Period (2500 BC to AD 200) across the world. In India, archaeologists trace the majority of the megaliths to the Iron Age (1500 BC to 500 BC), though some sites precede the Iron Age, extending up to 2000 BC.
For a while, scientific consensus was in favour of the theory that ideas emanated from a single cultural centre and were transported across the world by migrating populations—trans-cultural diffusion. Radical diffusionists went a step further, denying the possibility of parallel evolution of ideas completely, and asserting that all cultures and inventions can be tracked down to a single culture.
Modern research, however, increasingly disputes this view, with a tilt in favour of independent origin of ideas and inventions. “Constructing a menhir is one of the simplest things man could have done. However, the similarities are indeed startling in the case of the more complex dolmens. The question of why they appear almost coincidentally has not yet been settled satisfactorily, though scientists now postulate that since our brains are constructed in the same way, different peoples came to construct the same monuments independently,” says Srikumar Menon, professor of architecture, Manipal University.
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