Other ArchaeologyDavid Hoyle has written an introduction to how his landscape and horizon viewer web site app that links from our site pages works: Archaeoastronomy is the study of how ancient people understood and used the sky, and the role it played in their cultures. The location of a site within its landscape, along with relevant markers, is crucial in this study. It suggests that a cosmological system was maintained from the late Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age, and many Bronze Age monuments, especially those from the latter part of the Bronze Age, have been shown to follow specific astronomical patterns.
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PhotographyThe Megalithic Portal has the facility to log sites that you have visited, and our dedicated contributors have now logged over 60,000 visits to ancient sites on our pages! We also have another way to show off all these visits, in your own 'blog' format with images and customised maps. It's really easy to get started with so please do have a go.
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StonehengeWe present a retrospective by Rob Ixer, Peter Turner, Richard Bevins and Nick Pearce outlining 21st century Altar Stone research; it highlights the incremental ‘journey’ taken by researchers and the stone as they progressively moved away from west Wales. Research is ongoing...
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ResourcesVal Evans writes: I see that Tracey Ramsbottom has uploaded back copies of her Devon earth mysteries magazine, Wisht Maen. I would be pleased to offer up the original version of my book The Celtic Way, which is a walking guide through the prehistoric sites of western Britain.
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FunThe full rundown of the Top 15 single standing stones (and pairs) in the UK according to you, our Megalithic Portal visitors and contributors is here. Also announcing the two winners of the competition. I have added all the sites as entries in my visit log.
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FunTim Webb writes: Who cannot be moved by this site? It may lack the scope and scale of some and not have the same ambience of others. However it has a certain charm I feel and is possibly a one off that deserves wider attention.
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PhotographyBruce Adams, one of our members since 2012, sadly died late last year - he had motor neurone disease. Over the years Bruce assembled albums documenting his visits to many stone circles and related sites, including rubbings of the stones, sketches and lots of photos. Bruce kindly donated the albums to us and we have been scanning them to share prior to finding a permanent home for them. We now have five of his wonderful albums to browse online.
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Medieval (High and Late)　Chashi are earthen structures, i.e. area partitioned by deep ditch(es) constructed by Ainu people modifying the natural topographic features. More than 500 chashi are found in Hokkaidō and the total number of them might be 700 and more. The purpose and chronology of chashi are unclear, the purpose might be shifted over time: sacred area, place for ritual ceremonies, assembly plaza, warehouse of harvest and treasures, watchtower for school of fish or troops of enemies. The excavated artefacts prove that chashi are not older than 14th century, and many chashi were constructed between the 16th and 18th centuries (Ainu era) when conflicts or battles with immigrated Japanese occurred, they might have been constructed as military fortresses. Their types are classified as follows :
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ResourcesHere is our pick of some of the most interesting prehistoric sites to visit in the French Alps in the summertime. Click on the headings below to read more about each site and see their location. We will start at the welcoming resort village of Méribel, heading over to the border with Italy, and then south to find more intriguing sites.
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Multi-periodAn exclusive series on the North Wales uplands by archaeologist M M Robinson all linked from this page. The tide of human settlement has largely receded from the hills and mountains of North Wales, leaving us with one of the richest historic landscapes in Europe. This journal describes a series of walks through the valley and moorland environments of these uplands. Recurring themes include the search for ancient route ways, the importance of seasonal movements of stock (transhumance), abandoned territories of the Bronze Age, and more recent features which often go unnoticed such as sheepfolds, intake walls and abandoned homesteads. There is plenty here for readers whose starting point is an interest in megaliths.
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MysteriesA fascinating article from Anthony Weir: Are Irish sweathouses a continuation of a prehistoric tradition of inhaling consciousness-altering smoke, recently overlaid with the prophylactic function of saunas ? Cannabis is not likely to have been used in Ireland for a millennium at least, but a much more seriously-numinous means of widening the awareness is still to be found all over the island: Psilocybe lanceolata, or "magic mushrooms"....
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Multi-periodThis article was originally published in 2005: Is there a lost Neolithic trade route that took high quality flint from the mines at Grimes Graves to Stonehenge? Dr Ernest Rudge certainly thought so and spent many years researching what he called a "Lost Highway". Rudge located many puddingstone boulders that he thought acted as marker stones along the way. After his death in 1984, his work was summarised by John Cooper of the Department of Palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum. His summary gives a detailed itinerary, much of which I have now plotted on the Megalithic Map. I have John's permission to use information from his publication and he is delighted that further research will continue.
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Neolithic and Bronze AgeA fresh look at the Neolithic Cotswolds brings to light how its people lived their lives. Research has traditionally focused on the tombs and monuments of the period but Dr Nick Snashall (National Trust archaeologist for Avebury) makes it a matter of life as well as death, in a lecture that that explains how new evidence is revealing Neolithic life.
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Natural PlacesDavid Shepherd writes: A little while ago I was in contact with Tony Blackman regarding propped stones we had noted in Cornwall, the South Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales (Blackman 2011, Shepherd 2013), sadly our projected collaborative paper never happened because of Tony’s untimely passing. A recent visit was a belated attempt to follow on from our discussions, and these notes are, in a sense, an outsider’s view of Cornish propped stones. My time was limited and each site was visited once. I was only able to gather sparse details before my trip, but I did succeed in locating at least ten features – without getting into the ‘possible/probable/definite’ debate. The following seem to be well-known already, although not formally recorded, and I have supplied GPS-derived grid references, photos and inevitably incomplete commentaries.
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Neolithic and Bronze AgeThe commune of Orroli is located in the region of Sarcidano in Central Sardinia. This beautiful town is famous due to some of the most amazing prehistoric and protohistoric monuments in Sardinia, as well as fascinating landscapes and important examples of religious architecture. This article is an overview of the major archaeological sites in the commune of Orroli.
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ResourcesThe history of cannabis cultivation goes back thousands of years. Cannabis plants, also known as hemp, have been cultivated for many different reasons, it is an incredibly versatile plant. Here we look at evidence for the first medicinal, ritual or recreational uses for cannabis.
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ResourcesIn this article we’ll be looking at some of the best ancient sites to visit around Dubrovnik and the southern Adriatic coast of Croatia. The greatest gems of this area are its magnificent hillforts, begun in Iron Age times with megalithic or cyclopean walls, and later taken over and added to by the Romans.
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Neolithic and Bronze AgeAnne Tate writes: When a recent update from the Stone Rows of Great Britain website popped into my email inbox late on Sunday evening a few weeks ago, it was simply headed “Seven Years”. In this latest news bulletin, Sandy Gerrard quietly announced “It is more than seven years since I embarked on the journey to visit, record, and interpret the known stone rows of Great Britain …. Later this week I will be setting out to visit the two most northerly rows. Once these have been visited all of the surviving original rows identified from documentation will have been inspected”.
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Neolithic and Bronze AgeSomething we did in our book The Old Stones, was have a go at making an objective rating of the best of various types megalithic monuments to visit in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland. We did this by analysing numbers of visits, and ratings left for the various sites by visitors to the Megalithic Portal. Here is one of the lists we worked out - a run down of the best stone rows to visit in England - featuring many wonderful Dartmoor examples, and others you may not know.
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Multi-periodUp until the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, the Megalithic Temples of Malta were thought to be the oldest free-standing structures in the world. They are still some of the oldest known structures, having been built sometime between 3600 BC and 3000 BC. Seven of the Megalithic Temples of Malta have been designated World Heritage Sites by UNESCO.
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