If you raised your eyebrows over the paper titled ‘Radiocarbon dates and Bayesian modelling support maritime diffusion model for megaliths in Europe’ (Schulz Paulsson, Reference Schulz Paulsson2019), which was widely reported in the press, this book will interest you. Time and Stone is the revised version of the PhD dissertation of Bettina Schulz Paulsson, defended in 2013 at the University of Kiel in Germany. The book contains all the data, analysis, and discussion of the hypothesis concisely published in that 2019 paper, which basically posits that the megalithic phenomenon in Europe originated in northwest France (i.e. Brittany) in the second half of the fifth millennium bc, and that, within a time frame of 200–300 years, the idea or fashion of megalithic construction spread from there to southeast France and northeast Iberia, Corsica, Sardinia, mainland Italy, and western Iberia (summarized in pp. 329–30).
The research backing this hypothesis is the result of a huge endeavour of collecting and systematizing radiocarbon dates from across Europe, of reviewing the contexts and quality of the samples used from a wide array of publications written in various languages, and of modelling the dates and producing some coherent regional sequences from the available data. The author must be congratulated for that, and also for putting forward such a provocative hypothesis. The latter has contributed to renewed debate and research on the origins of monumentality in Europe, which was rather stagnated and too regionalized. However, as I outline below, there are key issues that in my opinion should be corrected and/or addressed by future research to achieve a more cogent understanding of the origins of megalithic monumentality in Europe and its role in the make-up of prehistoric communities in Europe (spoiler alert! I don't think there was a single-centre of origin).
The book is composed of twelve chapters and three appendices. Chapter 1 presents the research questions within the broader scholarly background, which is summarized in two pages. This is followed by Chapter 2, in which the methodological approach is also concisely presented. This is a ‘big data’ approach consisting of the collection and analysis of—mostly published but also some unpublished—radiocarbon dates from megalithic contexts across selected regions from Europe (a database with more than 2400 measurements). This included reviewing the contexts of samples and the relationship of radiocarbon dates with monument construction by determining if they are termini post quos (e.g. linked to pre-megalithic activity), termini ante quos (e.g. from burial activity), or were directly related to the construction event. The quality of samples and dates was also assessed, including the material (if determined) and the evaluation of a variety of effects (e.g. old wood, terrestrial, or marine reservoir). Finally, whenever possible, radiocarbon dates were analysed within a Bayesian framework, allowing for the production of a series of models with adjusted chronological intervals for each megalithic monument. Ultimately, Schulz Paulsson uses these more precise chronologies to evaluate the emergence and development of megaliths in Europe.
Chapters 3–10 present and discuss the evidence, the analyses, and the results produced for Northwest France (i.e. Paris Basin/Northern France, Brittany, Central-West France), Catalonia, Southern France, Corsica, Sardinia, the Maltese islands, Southern Spain, and West Iberian Peninsula, respectively. These different chapters present a similar structure, including subsections that deal with: (1) pre-megalithic structures and funerary rites; (2) transitional structures and the emergence of megaliths; (3) the appearance and architectonic features of megaliths; (4) megalithic architectures with radiocarbon dates and sequences; (5) dating inferred from artefacts; (6) megalithic burial rites; (7) contemporary non-megalithic burials; (8) conclusions. Chapter 11 covers regions where megalithic tombs are a slightly later phenomenon, from c. 4000 bc onwards (e.g. Britain and Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Balearic Islands, Italian peninsula, Sicily, and Switzerland).
Finally, Chapter 12 summarizes the results and presents the argument for the emergence and spread of megalithic monuments in Europe advanced above. The book is supplemented with three appendices. Appendix 1 includes a diagram illustrating the emergence and development of the phenomenon in the different regions following the modelled radiocarbon dates. Appendix 2 offers a very useful glossary of terms, explaining the terminologies used in the different regions and in their respective languages. Appendix 3 (available here: http://bit.ly/2vRAqEz) includes a database with the 2410 radiocarbon dates collected for this work, the model outcomes of calibrated data, and the programming codes. The text is complemented with a good range of figures, mostly composed of diagrams depicting the modelled dates, some basic maps, selected plans, and good quality colour photographs of some monuments.
The first issues that I noticed and that affect the overall interpretation of the results are those of coverage, scale, and sampling. The work is biased towards Northwest France (107 pages), while the Iberian Peninsula (Chs 4 and 10), for example, is discussed in 74 pages, and regions such as the central and western Pyrenees, the Cantabrian region or most of the Iberian Central Plateau, where there are some megalithic monuments with very old dates, are not considered. The ‘big data’ top-down, macro-scale approach of the research inevitably fails to capture the complex biographies of megalithic monuments and the intricate patterns of manipulation of human remains (e.g. some dates from bone samples are dismissed for being too old, that is, ‘outliers’; dated bone samples may not correspond to the earliest uses of megalithic tombs). Indeed, some megalithic monuments were recurrently used throughout some centuries, and old bone deposits were regularly cleared (Aranda et al, Reference Aranda, Díaz-Zorita, Hamilton and Milesi2020), while in other cases, very old human remains were inserted in more recent monuments (Teather, Reference Teather2018). And this is where the most serious methodological limitation of the research emerges: forty-four per cent of the samples used are human bones, and these inform us about the use (i.e. burial activity) of megaliths but, despite this, they are used in this book to discuss and hypothesize about the construction. Furthermore, for many of the samples of human bone there is no indication whether it was articulated or not (was it in primary or secondary position?). As Schulz Paulsson notes, from the charcoal samples available (a total of 944, thirty-nine per cent of all the samples), only three per cent seem to correspond to construction events (e.g. dates from bark and antler picks), while thirty-seven per cent would be termini ante quos and thirty-one per cent termini post quos (pp. 10–11).
Another issue that captured my attention is the way other dating methods, and particularly luminescence dating, are dismissed (pp. 11–12), when recent luminescence dating methods and approaches (e.g. in combination with micromorphology or profiling) are achieving much improved precision (e.g. Bailiff et al., Reference Bailiff, Jankowski, Gerrard, Gutiérrez and Wilkinson2019). Equally, their inclusion (especially in the case of existing measurements) within Bayesian models in combination with radiocarbon measurements increases their precision even more (Lanos & Philippe, Reference Lanos and Philippe2017). Given the proven limitations of radiocarbon for dating the construction of megalithic monuments due to the lack or scarcity of samples related to those construction events, would it not be desirable to develop a strategy combining radiocarbon and luminescence dating, which would be adapted to the specific needs and problems of this type of archaeological feature?
Finally, what about standing stones? They are mentioned in passing, in one paragraph where it is acknowledged that they precede or are contemporary to the earliest megalithic tombs in some regions, as indicated by stratigraphic data or suggested by radiocarbon dates. Nonetheless, added to the difficulty in dating their erection with radiocarbon dating, nothing else contributing to the final hypothesis of this research is noted (p. 311). This is striking as standing stones are actually the oldest megalithic monuments known to have emerged (probably simultaneously) in various European regions, such as Brittany and Corsica to name just two (e.g. Large & Mens, Reference Large, Mens, Laporte and Scarre2016; D'Anna, Reference D'Anna2011). Furthermore, recent and not so recent research has revealed that often the slabs used to construct megaliths had been older menhirs, decorated stelae, and perhaps part of older, dismantled megaliths, indicating that the phenomenon of megalithic monumentality is complex, and that the evidence we encounter may be showing a skewed perspective on the earliest monumentality.
I believe that one of the key contributions of this research is that, precisely through its bold take on the question of megalithic origins, it sparks many of these and other issues and questions, resets the research agenda, and renews the interest of researchers. A question that will require further research is that of diffusion, a concept that is often used—but not discussed in any depth—in this research. One idea that has become clearer during the last few decades is that no phenomenon in European prehistory happened in isolation and that connectivity played a key role in the transmission of knowledge and ideas and in the crafting of many traditions (e.g. in rock art or monumentality). Schulz Paulsson proposes maritime diffusion as the key vector of transmission of the idea of megalithic construction but the importance of river basins in general and in southwest Europe in particular, for example in connecting the Alps and southeast France with Brittany, cannot be overstated.
To finish, a note on research strategies: top-down perspectives are necessary as they contribute to (re)setting the big picture, but they need to be complemented with bottom-up approaches to improve in robustness and resolution. In the same vein as with the study of mobility, the ideal approach for unravelling the origins of monumentality would probably use complementary dating methods within a multiscalar framework of analysis.
