The Architecture of Mound Graves and Megalith Buildings

The Mousterians were cave men seeking shelter in caves but in summertime they made round huts of beehive design. In the Ukrainian sites Molodova and Mezhirich they built temporary shelters from mammoth bones and covered them with hides weighed down by heavy stones (Chernysh 1959: 48ff.). Their Mesolithic descendants can be sought in big-game hunters with round beehive-dwellings set on a stone basement. In the Bronze Age they began to breed cattle and build permanent stonewalled settlements on inaccessible rocks and hills. Their dead were buried under large heaps of stones and in stonewalled subterranean chambers from big blocks of stone that archaeologist denote as megaliths (Greek megalos ‘large’, lithos ‘stone’). Rocks and large megalith stones retained importance in their building arts up to the Middle Ages, when their fortified abodes began tower on rocks as castles surrounded by bastions.

Table 10. Cyclopean megalithic architecture

(Extract from Pavel Bělíček: Prehistoric Dialects II. Prague 2004, p. 396)