Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/137

Rh Human interments often occurred at the isolated menhirs and associated with these are found only simple pottery and instruments formed solely of stone and bone. Not a trace of bronze or iron, except where it was clearly of a later and intrusive character. Arrow and spear points, ceremonial stones, etc., closely resembling those of our American Indians, would point far back in the history of western Europe. Yet this is not conclusive, for these objects occur only in connection with human interments and one must make allowance for the well-known conservatism of the priestly class. Among other peoples the objects buried with the dead retained the primitive character long after the race had developed other forms in its daily life. So it may have been here. The fact that these burials were accompanied only by objects of the stone age is not conclusive proof that the people were ignorant of bronze or even of iron.

It is an interesting fact that the passages leading to the chambers of the dolmens are invariably so placed that the openings lie between the points of the rising and the setting of the sun at the summer solstice, possibly indicating that the builders were to a certain extent sun worshippers. From certain considerations of orientation the English astronomer, Lockyer, has figured out the date of the building of Stonehenge as about 1680 with a limit of probable error of two centuries either way. If his arguments be valid, there is a probability that the monuments of Carnac and Locmariaquer are at least as old. With such a throwing back of the age of these monuments there is more and more uncertainty as to who built them. The "Druids," who just appear on the pages of written history, were Keltish, but what evidence have we that Kelts dwelt in Brittany or Great Britain a thousand or fifteen hundred years before Christ? We know that other races dwelt in these regions before the immigrant Kelt. Did the Kelt erect these stones or did he find them where they still stand when he came? and did he simply adapt his religious rites to them? Who can say?

We are on a little more certain ground when we come to the purposes of the standing stones, or at least of some of them. As implied above, the isolated menhirs, usually placed on some spot a little above the surrounding country, have, in many cases, been found to stand near some burial, and hence it is probable that they are funeral monuments. Some may also have been boundary stones. The dolmens are also mortuary in character. Apparently every dolmen and allée couverte was formerly buried with earth or rocks, the whole forming a large mound—a tumulus or galgal. With the ages the earth in many cases has been removed, either by man or by the elements, leaving the strange "tables" as we see them. In other cases the tumulus still persists and many of these have been explored by modern archeologists, all revealing, in the interior, either a dolmen, an allée couverte, or smaller cairns of stones,