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Megaliths

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what we know about ancient stones placed in the landscape and stone monuments, which are often visually striking and can be up to 6,000 years old.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent.

Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.

With

Vicki Cummings
Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire

Julian Thomas
Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester

and

Susan Greaney
Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter.

Available now

50 minutes

Last on

Thu 2 Mar 2023 21:30
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

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LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS


READING LIST

R. Bradley, The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2019)

R. Bradley, The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe (Routledge, 1998)

A. Burnham (ed.), The Old Stones: A Field Guide to the Megalithic Sites of Britain and Ireland (Watkins, 2018)

G. Cooney, Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland (Routledge, 2000)

V. Cummings, The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland (Routledge, 2017)

V. Cummings and C. Richards, Monuments in the Making. Raising the Great Dolmens in Early Neolithic Northern Europe (Windgather Press, 2021)

T. Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (Routledge, 2010)

M. Edmonds, Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory (Routledge, 1999)

M.P. Pearson, Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery (Simon and Schuster, 2012)

K. Ray and J. Thomas, Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2018)

C. Richards (ed.), Building the Great Stone Circles of the North (Windgather Press, 2013)

C. Scarre, The Megalithic Monuments of Britain and Ireland (Thames and Hudson, 2007)

C. Scarre and L. Laporte (eds.), The Megalithic Architectures of Europe (Oxbow Books, 2015)

J. Thomas, The Birth of Neolithic Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013)


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Broadcasts

  • Thu 2 Mar 2023 09:00
    Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
  • Thu 2 Mar 2023 21:30
    Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

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