| [Kerdruelland, near Belz, in Morbihan]
Archaeologists working on the Kerdruelland site over the past nine months have discovered not one but 60 "lost" menhirs. They believe that they were erected - and then destroyed - during the "middle period" of the standing stones era in western Europe, in around 2500 BC. (This was about the same time that the main ring at Stonehenge was constructed, possibly by invaders from Brittany).
Because the Kerdruelland menhirs have been preserved in mud and silt for 4,500 years, they should offer important new information on how such alignments were created and why. At the well-known sites, such as Carnac and Stonehenge, some of the stones have been moved or propped up or stolen or added over the centuries. Here the stones, up to 2m long, lie just as they did after they were felled four-and-half millennia ago.
....The fact that the stones were erected, and then deliberately toppled, at roughly the same time, is also an important discovery. It offers new evidence that the neolithic was a period of social and religious upheavals, revolutions and wars. In other words, the neolithic may have been "megalithic" - obsessed with whacking great stones - but it was not socially or culturally monolithic. Ancient man was as fractious and destructive as modern man.
....Kerdruelland today is a banal stretch of seaside suburbia. Here and there a huge lump of rough, yellow-orange coloured granite pokes through the plastic protecting the site from summer storms. To have some idea of how Kerdruelland must have looked 4,000 years ago, you do not have to go far. Eight miles to the east are the three vast alignments of stones, and their associated "cromlechs", or large stone circles, near the village of Carnac. |
