ABSTRACT
The analysis presented in this chapter suggests the following conclusions. There seems to be a direct relationship between the difficulties encountered in ensuring a link with the productive land in a 'peasant way o f life' and the degree of sophisticated ritual in the funerary world from the end of the fourth to the beginning of the second millennia BC. B y this time, the world o f the dead seems to have greater symbolic potential for transforming society, and therefore its limits are defined very clearly. The burial is sited away from the settlement and located in an inaccessible place (such as a cave), thereby increasing the sense of privacy and concealment (see Whittle 1988: 181) (this is also reflected by burial in small and hidden caves), or by architecturally defined structures (dolmens and tholoi). Furthermore, the increase in ritual spaces that characterizes the evolution of the megaliths (Criado and Fábregas 1989; Thomas 1988) and caves seems to act as a setting for the transition from 'forebears' to 'ancestors', the connection between the world of the living and the world of the dead (Vázquez Varela 1992-3). This is symbolized by corridors and passages, and slabs o f stone cut to resemble doorways in the case of constructed tombs, or by distant locations in the case of caves. A n advanced stage of this process is where the tomb comes to represent the ancestors' 'house', their place o f residence, as happens in the Ozier i culture, thus definitively linking land to the lineage that works it. The ancestors 'live' there: the descendants as a group are thus linked with that land.
