Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/195

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COMMEMORATIVE MONUMENTS
187

decadence in this kind of architecture in South Britain, during which the well-known barrows of the Bronze Age became the prevailing type of burial. Another inference, and not an improbable one, is that the Neolithic invaders of Britain were already familiar with the art of constructing dolmens and megalithic monuments, before they left their European homes. This view finds support in the fact that nearly all the continental dolmens belonged to the pre-cremation period, and contained unburnt skeletons. Besides the dolmens, which are very numerous in the maddle and southern departments of France, there are in various districts throughout the country spacious caverns which had been used as ossuaries and burial-places by the earlier races. Of such memorials the caverns of L'Homme-Mort and Baumes-Chaudes (Lozère) may be instanced as good examples, both of which contained skeletons belonging exclusively to a dolichocephalic people. The dolmens of the Iberian Peninsula are also monuments of the Stone Age, and their interments consisted of skeletons with dolichocephalic skulls—a fact which also applies to the cave-burials of that country, some of which were older than the dolmens. Cremation would thus appear to have reached the Iberian portion of Europe at a comparatively late period in the Bronze Age, as was the case in North Britain.

In Scandinavia the Giant graves, all of which flourished in the Stone Age, gave place during the Bronze Age to large stone-lined