[CHAPTER III.]
Tombs and Mode of Interment during the Polished-stone Epoch—Tumuli and other sepulchral Monuments formerly called Celtic—Labours of MM. Alexandre Bertrand and Bonstetten—Funeral Customs.
Having in our previous chapters described and delineated both the weapons and instruments produced by the rudimentary manufacturing skill of man during the polished-stone epoch; having also introduced to notice the types of the human race during this period; we now have to speak of their tombs, their mode of interment, and all the facts connected with their funeral customs.
A fortunate and rather strange circumstance has both facilitated and given a degree of certainty to the information and ideas we are about to lay before our readers. The tombs of the men of the polished-stone epoch—their funeral monuments—have been thoroughly studied, described, and ransacked by archæologists and antiquarians, who for many years past have made them the subject of a multitude of publications and learned dissertations. In fact, these tombs are nothing but the dolmens, or the so-called Celtic and Druidical monuments; but they by no means belong, as has always been thought, to any historical period, that is, to the times of the Celts, for they go back to a much more remote antiquity—the pre-historic period of the polished-stone age.
This explanatory datum having been taken into account, we shall now study the dolmens and other so-called megalithic monuments—the grand relics of an epoch buried in the night of time; those colossal enigmas which impose upon our reason and excite to the very highest pitch the curiosity of men of science.
Dolmens are monuments composed of a great block or slab of rock, more or less flat in their shape according to the country in which they are situate, placed horizontally on a certain number of stones which are reared up perpendicularly to serve as its supports.
Fig. 130.—Danish Dolmen.
This kind of sepulchral chamber was usually covered by earth, which formed a hillock over it. But in the course of time this earth often disappeared, leaving nothing but the naked stones of the sepulchral monument.