contact: Jeff Matthews

Megaliths of Southern Italy and Elsewhere

They look as if they were dropped in place by a race of giants. As a matter of fact, folklore still refers to them in many parts of Europe as 'tombs of the giants'. Indeed, there are otherwise rational persons (because they refuse to believe in giants) who will look you in the eye and tell you that alien creatures with advanced technology must have levitated these things into place from orbiting spacecraft. They are 'megaliths'—from the Greek, meaning 'large stones'. The most famous group of megaliths is Stonehenge* on the Salisbury plain in southern England, but hundreds of other, smaller, sites exist in Europe from central Sweden down through Spain, France, Italy, the Mediterranean islands, and modern Turkey. They are also found throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Depending on the site, their construction has been dated back to anywhere between five and two thousand years BC. Many of the ones in Europe are closer to the earlier date and are the oldest examples of European architecture. (Indeed. Göbekli Tempe, cited below, has been called the oldest such site in the entire world.) Their builders are covered by the term "protohistoric," meaning "just before recorded history". We know very little about them except that they spent an inordinate amount of time pushing very heavy stones into place.
 

                                                                    Orkney Islands            Outer Hebrides            Göbekli Tempe       Scapa Flow  (directly below)

*Stonehenge is the best-known example of "standing stones" in Britain, but there are many other displays of an amazingly rich and well-preserved Neolithic landscape as you move north into the islands of northern Scotland to the Orkney islands and then up to Outer Hebrides, where the Callanish Stones (image, right) display a noteworthy 13 primary monoliths in a circle about 13 meters in diameter. There are dozens of such sites, most of which indicate they were put up around 3500-3000 BC., more or less at the same as the Egyptians started building pyramids. Maybe it was an idea whose time had come in Europe. They served for rituals, as calendars, as tomb markers, as boundary markers, but yet once again we are puzzled by much earlier sites such as that of Göbekli Tempe (in modern-day Turkey).

                                                           = = = = = SCAPA FLOW= = = = = (more megaliths below this section)

As long as you're up there admiring the amazing stone slabs of the Orkneys, look at the recent reason the Orkneys are a major tourist attraction. The Orkneys contain the Scapa Flow, a harbor that played an important part in both World Wars, the Great War (1914-18) and the Even Greater War (1939-45). Indeed, the sheltered waters have played a vital role in travel, trade and war for centuries. Vikings anchored their longships in Scapa Flow more than a thousand years ago. In the 20th century, it was the United Kingdom's chief naval base during both World Wars. It was closed in 1956, but you can visit the indoor museum and look at the outdoor displays. The Orkneys are a large museum of Naval History of the 1900s.

In World War I, it was where the German navy scuttled their mighty High Seas fleet on 21 June 1919. British guard ships were able to beach some of the ships, but 52 of the 74 interned vessels sank. Many of the wrecks were salvaged over the next two decades and were towed.

Scapa Flow is the small harbor in the center in the image below. It is at 59° N. latitude, just below the arctic circle Here, you
    have a smaller group of Scottish islands, the Shetlands, 125 km above to the NE; and the coast of Norway 500 km directly east.
The Orkney Islands surround Scapa Flow . The mainland of Scotland is below it.
The large body of water at the lower right is the Moray Firth, an estuary leading into the city of Inverness at the SW extremity and to
    the river Ness and nearby Loch Ness.

Admiral Hans Hermann Ludwig von Reuter (1869–1943) was the German commander of the High Seas fleet. He ordered the scuttling of the fleet to keep the British from seizing the ships. The politics of the Nov.11, 1918 armistice were important. As the deadline neared for the German delegation to sign the Treaty of Versailles, admiral Reuter was sure his ships would be handed over to the victorious Allies. To prevent this, he ordered all 74 ships scuttled. All ships were ready for this. Within five hours, 10 battleships, five battlecruisers, five light cruisers, and 32 destroyers sank in Scapa Flow. The battleship SMS Baden, the light cruisers SMS Emden, SMS Nürnberg, SMS Frankfurt and SMS Bremse and 14 destroyers were beached when British watch personnel intervened in time to tow them to shallow water. Only four destroyers remained afloat. Nine Germans were killed in scuffles and were the last German war deaths of World War I.

Scapa Flow was the main anchorage for the British Grand Fleet for most of WWI, but in the interwar period this passed to Rosyth, further south in the Firth of Forth. Scapa Flow was reactivated when WWII started as the base for the British Home Fleet. Its natural and artificial defenses were strong but in need of improvement, and in the early weeks of the war were strengthened with additional blockships.

World War II is now what attracts much historical interest to Scapa Flow. It was where the first German attack on British Forces took place. Commander of German submarines, Karl Dönitz, devised a plan to attack Scapa Flow within days of the outbreak of the war (WWII began 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland). Strategically, the Dönitz plan would displace the British Home Fleet from Scapa Flow and slow their North Sea blockade and give Germany greater freedom to attack the Atlantic convoys that were supplying U.S. munitions to Britain. The Dönitz plan was also a symbolic act of vengeance, striking at the same location where the German High Seas Fleet had scuttled itself following Germany's defeat in WWI. Dönitz picked captain Günther Prien for the task; the raid was on the night of 13/14 October 1939. The tides were high and the night moonless.

On 14 October 1939, the British fleet anchored at Scapa Flow included the Royal Oak, a WWI battleship (built in 1908). She was torpedoed by German submarine U-47. Of Royal Oak's complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed that night or died later of their wounds. The loss was the first of five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in WWII. The loss of Royal Oak did little to alter the numerical superiority of the British navy and its Allies but it had a great effect on British wartime morale. Before the sinking of Royal Oak, the Royal Navy had thought Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack, but the U-47 showed that the German navy could bring the war home to British waters. This shock led to rapid changes in dockland security and the building of "Churchill barriers" around Scapa Flow.

The wreck of Royal Oak is an official war memorial. She lies almost upside down in 100 feet (30 m) of water with her hull 16 feet (4.9 m) beneath the surface. In an annual ceremony marking the loss of the ship, Royal Navy divers place a White Ensign underwater at her stern. Unauthorized divers may not approach the wreck, as per the Protection of Military Remains Act of 1986.

Building Churchhill Barriers (four causeways to block access to Scapa Flow meant a large labor force, which peaked in 1943 at over 2,000. Much of the labor was provided by 1,300 Italian P.O.W.s captured in the desert war in North Africa; they were moved to Orkney starting in early 1942. In 1943, the Italian prisoner-laborers built an ornate Italian Chapel, which still survives and is a tourist attraction (images,right and below).

Of human interest is that the chapel was made from very sparse materials. It was in the form of a tin tabernacle: two Nissen huts joined end-to-end (aka as  "Quonset hut" in U.S. English). The workers put plasterboard on the corrugated interior and the altar and altar rail were both made from concrete left over from work on the barriers. Most of the interior decoration was by Domenico Chiocchetti (1910-1999), a prisoner from Moena in the Italian Dolomites. He painted the sanctuary end of the chapel; fellow prisoners did the interior. They created a facade out of concrete, concealing the shape of the hut so that inside it all looked like a church. The light holders were made from corned beef cans. The baptismal font was the inside of a car exhaust covered in a layer of concrete. When prisoners were released shortly before the end of the war, Chiocchetti stayed on to finish the newly consecrated chapel. By profession, he was a painter, mostly of religious images, in his hometown of Moena. He returned some years later to touch up the chapel. The chapel is impressive, as was he.

We needed to salvage the ships at Scapa Flow as long as atomic testing was going on. Modern instruments need
"low-background steel", steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and '50s. The "atomic age" began with the "Trinity" test on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico in the U.S. That was the first explosion of an atomic bomb. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the nuclear testing in the early years of the Cold War raised background radiation levels across the world. Steel was contaminated with radionuclides since it used atmospheric air. Scapa Flow was a good source of low-background steel, many ships built before the atomic age, all in one place, easy to get at.

Low-background steel does not suffer from nuclear contamination. Such steel is used in devices that need the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides. Devices that require low-background steel include geiger counters, medical apparatus, scientific equipment in photonics, and aeronautical and space sensors. When atmospheric nuclear testing stopped, background radiation dropped to near natural levels, and special low-background steel was no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses. Modern brand-new steel has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications.

= = = = = = = = = = = = =  End of 'Scapa Flow'  = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Back to megaliths. There are basically two kinds of megaliths: dolmen and menhir. Both words are from Breton, a Celtic language spoken in an area of northern France where a great many of them have been found. Dolmen means "table stone" and menhir "tall stone". Thus, dolmen refers to a chambered construction, generally a flat table stone supported on three sides by upright slabs, with the fourth side open as an entrance to the chamber. In some cases there may also be a covered corridor leading into the chamber through the open side. The smaller stone slabs arrayed on either side of the entrance define the corridor leading to the main chamber. Originally, dolmens served as tombs, either for individuals or groups, and both chamber and entrance were covered over with cairns or earth. 

Although dolmens clearly had a funerary purpose and, hence, probably played a significant part in religious rituals and other ceremonies of the Neolithic peoples who built them, there is much less unanimity of opinion on the function of free–standing menhirs, such as the circle at Stonehenge or the spectacular group of megaliths in the Orkney islands in northern Scotland, as noted above. They may have served as boundary markers, clan identification, or as ceremonial sites. Some of them, Stonehenge, for example, are astronomically exact, and probably functioned in ceremonial capacity at certain times of the year, such as at the solstice or equinox. Some menhirs might even have been phallic symbols connected to fertility rites. Both menhirs and dolmens have been found decorated with spirals or zig–zag designs. Wooden monuments existed, as well, but, these have been much more vulnerable to the ravages of time than their stone cousins.

(Image directly above - megalithic architecture on the island of Malta. Of particular interest is the "Submarine monolith in the Sicilian Channel" between Sicily and Malta.)            (image directly below, right)

Speculation on who built the megalith monuments of Europe, and why, has varied over the last few centuries. Scholarly research, employing modern dating methods, have put to rest a number of earlier theories, such as that they started on Crete in the third millennium b.c. and spread out from there. Many monuments along the Atlantic coast of France are, in fact, older than similar ones on Crete. In the 17th century there was also a short–lived theory that was quite ready to hold that the Romans built them as they spread across Europe a mere two thousand years ago, or that Celtic druids had built them as sacrificial altars. In the early 20th century, some scholars believed in "hyperdiffusion", that all megaliths in Europe —the amazing abundance of them in Spain,* in the British isles (famously Stonehenge, but many others), the giant "Nuraghi" tombs and slabs on Sardinia, the slabs in southern Italy called the "Stentinello culture" (named for a site near the SW tip of Sicily), dated to 5,000 B.C. —that all this belonged to one giant "megalithic culture." Modern dating has shown that not to be the case. Nor is it believed any longer that there was even one single pan-European megalithic culture. The tendency now is to think that megaliths are  a product of the so–called "Neolithic Revolution", the period during which hunting and gathering cultures slowly changed over to more stable societies based on agriculture and animal husbandry. Important regional cultures certainly existed in the Neolithic period and are defined by different kinds of stone circles and local pottery styles. No one now claims such a broad unity of all aspects of stone-age archaeology. After all, where would it stop? These things exist all over the world. A global "megalithic culture"? Who built the first fire? Maybe that was an idea whose time had come  —like the need to mark boundaries, build tombs, and mark the passage of the heavens by raising megaliths.

*
In Spain, the Dolmen of Guadalperal, called the "Spanish  Stonehenge”, megaliths
from between 2000 and 3000 BC, in eastern Extremadura, are now totally visible.
The reservoir  that was covering the megaliths has receded because of a drought.                                                                                                                                (photo, right)

This change started in the Middle East in the 9th millennium b.c. and spread westward into Europe by the 6th millennium b.c. Giving up a nomadic way of life meant that villages could be built, places where entire generations of inhabitants would come of age and pass away, and where there is passing away there has always been —much earlier than even these Neolithic peoples— a human tendency to mark that passage. Thus, the monuments were probably put in place over quite a wide span of time by various peoples who perhaps had no idea that other tribes were doing the same thing a thousand miles distant.

(Image directly above - megaliths on the island of Sardinia)

The presence of the megaliths has fascinated us, true, but has also attracted the hostility of the Christian religion over the last two thousand years. They were often seen as holdovers from paganism, and, as such, a number of them were destroyed. In many cases, however, they were Christianized, that is, crosses were inscribed on them, so they might serve as Christian altars.

They have been built in our own times, too, but not in Europe. Inhabitants of Madagascar have been seen to erect dolmens and menhirs by the oldest 'hydraulic' technology in the world —human sweat. So much for the claim that megaliths could not have been moved without the aid of extraterrestrial technology.

The heel of the boot of Italy, Apulia, is rich in megaliths, particularly dolmens: Giovinazzo, Santa Sabina near Brindisi, Altamura, and Minerrini di Lecce near Otranto are a few of the many sites. (Also, there are a few dolmen in Sicily dated to around 2900-2100 BC. One group is on the slopes of Mount Castellaccio near Messina.) Perhaps the best preserved and most easily accessible dolmen in the south of Italy is in an orchard just off the autostrada to Bari, (image at the very top of this page) a few minutes' walk from the rest stop/filling station named Dolmen di Biscieglie [photo at the top of this page]. It's on the northbound side, so if you stop on the way down to Bari you will have to walk under the autostrada and come up on the other side. Walk out the back of the rest-stop and follow the signs. A small park has recently been built around it and the site itself is marked by a small plaque to "our unknown forebears". It is a lonely, potentially eerie, site and if you are given to searching for affinity with the ages, this is a good place to sit and think about a few dozen villagers four or five thousand years ago who built this tomb for their dead and then went back to their daily routine and puzzled over life and death just the way we do today. 

added August 2020

I didn't learned much about central and south America from Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944). I knew Goofy was a dog, Donald Duck never wore pants, and parrots smoke cigars.

Yet if I hear names such as Mayan, Aztec, Olmec, Inca, Machu Picchu, they mean something to me. I can no longer place them properly geographically or chronologically, but at least I know that we're talking about pre-Columbian Central or South America. I note that raised stone tablets are everywhere and now I think almost everywhen, for I just found a new one, a pre-Columbian civilization I had never heard of in my life. Not once. It has been written about since the 1990s and is called Caral-Supe (also known as Caral and Norte Chico). It is a complex pre-Columbian-era society that had as many as thirty major population centers in what is now the Caral region of north-central coastal Peru.

The  civilization flourished between the fourth and second millennia BC, (look at those dates!) with the formation of the first city generally dated to around 3500 BC, at Huaricanga. It is from 3100 BC onward that large settlements and communal construction become clearly apparent. That lasted until the decline around 1800 BC. Since the early twenty-first century, it has been established as the oldest-known civilization in the Americas! The "type site" is Aspero,  at the mouth of the Supe river on the north-central Peruvian coast. The site covers an area of about 35 acres. It has two large platform mounds along with 15 other smaller mounds. They have no defensive fortifications! Warfare does not seem to have been a feature of these early Peruvian settlements.
photos 15 August 2004
Håkan Svensson Xauxa
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[Also see the photos of Bronze Age nuraghi settlements and 'tombs of the giants' on Sardinia by clicking here. The general article on Sardinia (click here) may also be of interest. Also see the entry on Malta for information about similar structures there; particularly see this link to "Submarine Monolith in the Sicilian Channel." ]

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