ABSTRACT
About 2500 B.c., the Passage Grave builders arrived in the Irish Sea from Brittany, and built their first tombs on the Menai Straits between Anglesey and the mainland of Wales and on the opposite shore of the Irish Sea in Ireland. Unlike the builders of other megalithic tombs, these people grouped their graves in cemeteries, their first insular Irish one clustered tightly around imposing central tombs set in commanding positions in the valley of the Boyne river. Here, in this first eastern cemetery, they secured a powerful economy and constructed massive tumuli which, in the elegance of their structural and artistic features, reveal their builders’ sophistication and the richness and maturity of the culture they established in Ireland.
