ABSTRACT
On the Mediterranean coast the Pyrenean culture extended from the first past the east end of the Pyrenees across the French frontier, and there were analogous developments on this side of the mountain chain, though they are less well explored. The megaliths of Languedoc are thickly distributed all round the south of the French ‘ massif central’, and though they continued to be used and made to a late date, the close parallels among them to the forms of their Catalan neighbours leave little doubt that their inception was nearly or quite as early. As in Catalonia, again, natural cave-sepulchres were still much used, e.g. in the Narbonne district, just as caves continued as the principal sites of habitation, but cave-tombs and megaliths were simply alternative forms of collective sepulchre within the same culture, and that culture’s material shows it to be still based on the old Western Neolithic, with its plain and pierced-lug pottery, compounded with native ‘ cave-culture’ elements on the one hand, and on the other now with incomings by sea. O f the latter a main source in Sardinia has already (p. 159) been suggested by the distinctive concentric-semicircle or twin-eye pattern grooved or rather
‘ channelled5j on the pottery of these regions, and this may be traced from the Mediterranean coast north-westwards, across the tributary valleys of the Garonne to the Charente district of the Atlantic littoral. In this direction, as we saw above (p. 159), it is not followed by the pointille incised style which occurs with it in the South French caves, and its priority in association with the original current of collectivetomb civilization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic is confirmed and explained by its evidently magical character. For from South France it appears, most significantly in the twin-eye form already noticed in Sardinia and further east at Los Millares (pp. 158,164), not only in the fortified settle ment of Peu-Richard in the lower Charente,3 but in a megalithic tomb at Availles near by in the Deux-Sevres, while in the same direction north-westward across Languedoc are found sculptured slabs, some tall free-standing stones but others forming part of megalithic tombs, on which analogous eyes and semicircles enter into the delineation of the same female divinity that we have found similarly portrayed on the plaqueand phalange-idols of Iberia. This comer of the Mediterranean, then, owes its importance as the start of our short or ‘ Pyrenean’ route to the north to something more than the coastwise contacts with Almeria manifest on its Catalan side: with these, but acting principally on the French side in Languedoc, we have direct influence from Sardinia, whence prospecting voyagers brought the same religious ideas as were being diffused simultaneously and in the same fashion from Almeria.
