Megaliths

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss megaliths - huge stones placed in the landscape, often visually striking and highly prominent. Such stone monuments in Britain and Ireland mostly date from the Neolithic period, and the most ancient are up to 6,000 years old. In recent decades, scientific advances have enabled archaeologists to learn a large amount about megalithic structures and the people who built them, but much about these stones remains unknown and mysterious.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Vicki Cummings No other episodes
  Professor of Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire
• Julian Thomas No other episodes
  Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester
• Susan Greaney No other episodes
  Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Exeter

Reading list

• The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland
  R. Bradley (Cambridge University Press, 2019) Google Books →
• The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe
  R. Bradley (Routledge, 1998) Google Books →
• The Old Stones: A Field Guide to the Megalithic Sites of Britain and Ireland
  A. Burnham (ed.) (Watkins, 2018) Google Books →
• Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland
  G. Cooney (Routledge, 2000) Google Books →
• The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland
  V. Cummings (Routledge, 2017) Google Books →
• Monuments in the Making. Raising the Great Dolmens in Early Neolithic Northern Europe
  V. Cummings and C. Richards (Windgather Press, 2021) Google Books →
• Prehistoric Britain
  T. Darvill (Routledge, 2010) Google Books →
• Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory
  M. Edmonds (Routledge, 1999) Google Books →
• Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery
  M.P. Pearson (Simon and Schuster, 2012) Google Books →
• Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds
  K. Ray and J. Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Building the Great Stone Circles of the North
  C. Richards (ed.) (Windgather Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The Megalithic Monuments of Britain and Ireland
  C. Scarre (Thames and Hudson, 2007) Google Books →
• The Megalithic Architectures of Europe
  C. Scarre and L. Laporte (eds.) (Oxbow Books, 2015) Google Books →
• The Birth of Neolithic Britain
  J. Thomas (Oxford University Press, 2013) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m001jkzg

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jkzg

Auto-category: 930.1 (Archaeology of ancient civilizations)