ABSTRACT
The history of research on the megalithic monuments of western Europe provides a clear illustration of the deleterious effects of the split between historical and processual approaches in archaeology. In this paper, some of these effects will be illustrated, but then, using essentially the same material, an alternative approach will be examined. A perspective that treats the evidence as ideologically informed representations can resolve the previous dichotomies and indicate the potential in the study of prehistoric social relations. Initially the Neolithic tombs and monuments were seen as caused by a spread of megalith builders or of the megalithic idea (Montelius 1899; Childe 1925; 1957; Crawford 1957; Daniel 1958). For example, Piggott (1965, 60) saw the adoption or propagation of the collective chambered tombs linked to a spread of new religious ideas, and the link between megaliths, frameworks of ideas and world pictures continues to be stressed by, for example, Kinnes (1981, 83). Recently, however, some archaeologists have criticised this use of historical and distributional arguments and have suggested that the occurrence of megaliths cannot simply be explained in cultural terms (for example, Chapman 1981, 72). In some of these more recent works there has been a tendency to be concerned mainly with generalisations, such as the use of megaliths as markers of territory, or of social and economic tensions. This has had the effect of removing megaliths and Neolithic burials from their historical context in western Europe, and from the domain of the ideological, by which I refer to meaningful social action and negotiation within specific historical contexts.
