ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the ideology of megalithism has profoundly shaped approaches to dolmens over the past 150 years. It explores how megalithism influenced 19th century attitudes towards Levantine dolmens; and how it developed into theories of diffusionism in the early 20th century. The chapter shows how megalithism underscored the association between dolmens and nomads in the later 20th century; and how it continues to affect the way we approach dolmens today. While Mattanyah Zohar had built an argument on unsubstantiated assertions of megalithism and outdated assumptions of nomadism, Prag approached the Dead Sea dolmens from a landscape perspective that considered dolmens in relation to settlement patterns and local topography. Today, dolmens are also known in places as disparate as Madagascar, Indonesia and Japan. As archaeology developed into a more scientific discipline in the early 20th century, assumptions of megalithism that underlaid 19th century scholarship were incorporated within anthropologically derived diffusionist theories of cultural change.
