Monuments on the move. Assessing megaliths’ interaction with the North-Western Iberian landscapes (original) (raw)

Monuments as such implicitly have a perennial character and act as a presumed means for consecrating or marking out especial places. This would be the case with megalithic mounds, which add their funerary character to the afore- mentioned features. However, in recent decades an increasing emphasis has been placed on the relationship between megaliths and movement. This was initially understood in the simpler sense of a correlation between mound location and paths across the landscape, before later on taking on a more structural character, relating to the internal change (mobilisation) of the building components, with the incorporation of allochthonous materials into both the construction itself (vg. bringing in orthostats on non-local stones) and as a part of the grave goods. Accordingly, they appear to evoke more or less distant places and the displacements implied to gathering them in the framework of the tomb. Such observations can now be better substantiated in areas such as the Barbanza peninsula (Galicia, Spain), where a relatively thorough cat- alogue of megaliths is available, showing – to start with – that these are far from being bound to the high sierra, despite showing denser concentrations there. The enlisting of Geographical Information Systems and statistics will show how mounds are associated with transit routes and – more locally – with conspicuous areas more often than rock art sites, for instance. As a result, we may contemplate megalithic architecture not as something exclusively or mainly static but rather as dynamic and linked to a cognitive geography developed by communities in the Late Prehistory that carry on the exploitation of different landscapes and resources, from the very coast to the uplands.