Mégalithisme et organisation de l'espace

More than a mere mode of funerary architecture, megalithism translates a way of thinking which represents the specificity of the Middle Neolithic period for the Atlantic region, from Armo- rica to Portugal. It differs from the Balkano-Danubian Neolithic, as from that of the Mediterranean region, by its funerary rites, its architecture, its art and what we can perceive of its ideology. Religious life there seems to have been based on ancestor worship, whereas in the Balkan and Central European traditions the cult seems to have been addressed first and foremost to divinities (van Berg, 1991 ; van Berg and Cauwe, in press b ; van Berg and Cauwe, infraj. It cannot be stated that the former completely ignored gods and the latter ancestors, but merely that, in each group, one of these two sources of religious power seems to have prevailed. Moreover, by the end of the 4th millennium (all dates are given in calendar years, based on calibrated C14), a third party entered into play : the Eastern European cultures who had mastered metallurgy. What happened when these heterogeneous worlds met ? Several outcomes are possible and examination of them sheds light on some poorly explained features of the European Neolithic. When analysing the complexity of our own cultures, we recognise at the very least the combined influences of Athens Rome and Jerusalem ; during the Neolithic, the density of inter-regional relations suggests, mutatis mutandis, a multicultural approach of many phenomena which may be regional in their expression but not in their genesis

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