ABSTRACT
In Atlantic Europe, megalithic stone-chambered monuments were constructed over a 2000-year period, with their design, construction, use, abandonment, orientation, and landscape setting changing little over this time. These repositories for the dead mimicked caves and rock shelters which had previously been used for the same process – to bury and venerate the dead. At some point, either during construction, use or even abandonment, communities with an ancestral obligation to maintain these monuments latched on to the idea to decorate a select number of chambers and passages using a set of engraved and painted figurative and geometric motifs. This concept of venerating the dead began to spread northwards to other core areas, along the coastal fringes of Atlantic Europe, with each core area developing variations on a theme in terms of motif design, motif relationships, and their distribution within each monument.
In this chapter, I discuss and report on the findings of the Megalithic Art in Portugal (MAP) project – which is dedicated to exploring and expanding our current knowledge of how artistic endeavour became a device in the way Neolithic communities disposed and venerated their dead.
