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The monumental forms of Early to the Late Neolithic include round ceremonial enclosures and circular settings for the burial of human remains. In Ireland, the developed passage grave or passage tomb consists of a large round mound, entered by a long passage of megaliths leading to a stone-built chamber. Neolithic inhabitants also built the largest chambered long barrow causeway enclosure and cursus and the largest henges: the Avebury henge, Marden and Mount Pleasant Henges, and the Durrington Walls. About two miles and southwest of Durrington is the most famous prehistoric monument in the world: Stonehenge.

The villages in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, host some of the most lavish feasts in Southeast Asia, especially for funerals or memorials. In addition megaliths were raised for the wealthiest deceased family members. There is also considerable variability in economics, sociopolitical organization, and feasting within the Torajan area. This chapter discusses and tries to explain some of this variability, from low level transegalitarian villages in poor mountainous areas to the proto- or real chiefdom levels of the valley bottoms where paddy rice produces major surpluses. The corporate kindred with its ancestral house as the center of ritual and feasting activities is a distinctive feature of Torajan societies. Slavery was very developed, and secondary burials were strongly associated with elites in order to provide enough time to amass as much wealth as possible for proper funeral feasts. Why funeral feasts feature so prominently in Southeast Asia tribal societies is discussed. Other feasts were hosted by households, reciprocal work groups, lineages, corporate kindreds, villages, districts, and village alliances.

The most active and still vibrant megalithic tradition in Southeast Asia is probably found in Sumba. Given the importance of megaliths and their interpretation in prehistoric archaeology, and given the intimate association of megaliths and feasting in the Torajan area, we focused considerable attention on the feasting traditions of Sumba, especially as they related to megaliths. The megaliths are also associated spatially and behaviorally with ancestral corporate lineage houses. The logic of megalithic construction is discussed together with benefits sought by hosts for sponsoring feasts. The range of major feasting types is described.

This chapter turns towards artefacts, tracing the sudden rise in interest in prehistoric sites and monuments across Scotland during this period. It shows that cutting-edge approaches to the study of material as diverse as Roman forts and ancient megaliths could interact with older syncretist theories of knowledge and human origins to produce surprising, sometimes radical, reinterpretations of the distant past. Archaeologists and writers as diverse as the opera singer-turned-antiquary Alexander Gordon and the freethinker John Toland used these ancient monuments as telescopes through which to glimpse an almost unimaginable antiquity, one which could exert a dramatically destabilizing effect on present-day hierarchies of culture and geography.

Perhaps the most characteristic of all minor landforms on exposed granite surfaces approaching horizontality are flat-bottomed or, less commonly, hemispherical hollows ranging in diameter from 15–20 cm to a few metres. They are known under a variety of local names, such as Opferkessel in German, pias in Spanish, vasques in French, or gnamma, which is an Aboriginal word occasionally used in Australia (e.g. Twidale and Corbin, 1963). In English, these superficial features are collectively described as weathering pits. They are not unique to granite, but are also abundant in sandstone and occur in other lithologies too. A remarkable flatness of floors of many shallow pits is reflected in another name present throughout the literature, namely that of a ‘pan’ (e.g. Twidale and Corbin, 1963; Fairbridge, 1968; Dzulynski and Kotarba, 1979). However, and despite a more accurate reflection of the form, the term ‘pan’ for weathering pits has fallen into disfavour, apparently because an identical name is used to describe much larger, closed topographic depressions within low-angle surfaces in arid lands. The majority of weathering pits are either closed features or there is a narrow outlet in the form of a channel trending away from the pit (Plate 4.1). Another type is an ‘armchair pit’, which grows into the rock surface from the side of an outcrop. These are hemispherical and wide open. At many localities pits may coalesce to form extensive networks, or else they are joined by channel-like features. Weathering pits in granite show a wide range of dimensions. Hollows in excess of 10 m long and 3 m deep have been reported, and the largest ever described is probably one in Australia, measuring 18.3 × 4.6 × 1.8 m (Twidale and Corbin, 1963). Unfortunately, there are very few systematic measurements of large populations of pits, and this severely restricts any attempts to generalize about the size of pits. Goudie and Migoń (1997) provided such a data set for two outcrops in the central Namib Desert. An interesting observation is that weathering pits in this arid area are much larger than their counterparts in humid temperate latitudes.

An analysis of granite landscapes would not be complete if the modifying human factor were ignored (Godard, 1977). Over the millennia humans have used the resources provided by granite, whether in a solid or weathered state, taken advantage of the spatial configuration of granite landforms, or mimicked natural granite features for various purposes. The combination of rock outcrops, regolith-mantled surfaces, and soil characteristics has acted as a significant constraint on many human activities, especially in the past. Hence many granite areas have very specific histories of human impact. The monumentality of many granite landforms has inspired fear, awe, and spiritual experience, whereas in the modern era the distinctiveness of many granite terrains has become a magnet for tourism. Each of these activities has left its imprint on granite landscapes, to the extent that some of them easily fall into the category of ‘cultural landscapes’, while in others, man-made features have evidently overwhelmed the natural configuration of the land. In this closing chapter of the book a few aspects of human transformation on natural granite landscapes will be briefly addressed. The coverage, and particularly the selection, of examples are by no means exhaustive, and the historical context has not been explored. The intention is rather to review some of the most characteristic relationships between humans and granite landscapes and to show that the characteristics of natural granite landforms dictate very specific adjustments, uses, and strategies of landscape change. Therefore, extensive referencing has also been avoided. The middle and late Neolithic in western Europe (3500-1700 BC) was a period of extraordinary construction activity using local and imported stone. It was not limited to granite lands, but the availability of durable monumental stone was certainly important. Therefore, uplands and rolling plains underlain by granitoid rocks abound in a variety of megalithic structures, including standing stones, stone circles and rows, passage tombs, simple dolmens, burial mounds (cairns), and stone enclosures. Extensive assemblages of Neolithic monuments occur on the Alentejo plain in southern Portugal, in western Spain, in Brittany, France, and on the uplands of south-west England, from Dartmoor through Bodmin Moor, Carnmenellis to Land’s End.

This chapter develops a theory of the border structure of the fence. The fence introduces the first major kinopolitical divisions into the flows of the earth. It divides the earth from itself and creates the first social borders between people. However, the border regime of the fence is no mere relic of the past. Once it was invented by early humans, it persisted throughout history wherever we find the social practice of cutting up the body of the earth and compelling it into a centripetal accumulation: corrals that hunt down and capture disjoined flows (dragnets, manhunts, kettling); palisades that erect defensive stake structures to protect a kinetic stock (houses, plots of land, military limits); and megalith practices of verticality and directional signage that mark the boundaries of a territory (road signs, memorial sites, sacred sites).

This chapter surveys a range of community commemorations in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada and the United States that constitute smaller scale, vernacular counterparts to officially sanctioned (and nationally scaled) monumental projects. Whether navigating volatile commemorative geographies marked by sectarian divisions; editing and refashioning traditional monumental forms like the high cross or megalithic stones; or indulging in fictive melodrama through bronze figurative groups – diasporic monuments reveal a surprising continuity with nineteenth-century methods of visualising Famine, substituting the heroic for the ugly, optimism for despair, sentimentality for horror. Adopting a transnational approach, the survey and case studies of this chapter demonstrate how Famine memorials bear a striking resemblance to one another and share a repetitive, often romanticized visual vocabulary, as well as strong threads of interconnection that bind monuments across three continents to one another. Though the rallying cry ‘Remember the Famine’ unites these memorials, their form indicates that questions of what diasporic Famine memory actually is and why it should be remembered remain far from consensual.

The production and, most especially, the transportation of very large stones were always opportunities for spectacle in preindustrial times. The Egyptian obelisks in Rome as well as the Thunder Stone of St. Petersburg are outstanding examples of phenomenal efforts against gravity undertaken by Roman emperors or by Catherine the Great to demonstrate that imperial power and skilled engineering were at an apex. The largest ashlar blocks ever placed into a wall were set up in Baalbek, Lebanon. To move those megaliths, some 500 to 1,000 tons in weight, and to put them into place required highly experienced stone masons and complex machinery—a considerable technical challenge accompanied by spectacular scenes of transportation. Are the Baalbek megaliths, as well, witnesses of Roman power in the Levant? Or does the use of very large stones merely follow a structural rationale? This chapter aims to position the megalithism of Baalbek between design and construction and between skilled workmanship, architectural expression, and imperial power.