Burial chambers of the Neolithic

In the Neolithic - the New Stone Age - the older you were, the more important you were, and thus logically the dead were the most important of all. Ancestor worship became the centre of people's lives, and great emphasis was placed on the burial of the dead.

Magnificent tombs where therefore built as houses for the dead. Some of the finest of these are the Clava cairns, in North East Scotland, near Inverness. Here stone chambers were built, and then stones were built up around them to form a mound, and a long passage was constructed so that the tombs could be entered again and again. But when were they built, and what was their meaning? Professor Richard Bradley has been excavating there to find out ...

The best idea of a chambered tomb can perhaps be obtained from this high-level view of the northern-most tomb, here stripped by the excavators. The passage can clearly be seen leading into the circular chamber at the centre.

Note that the cairn is surrounded by a platform which has been partly excavated. There is also a ring of standing stones around the cairn, some of which can be seen in the background. Stone circles are generally considered to be 'Bronze Age' rather than 'Neolithic' so perhaps this suggests that these tombs are very late in the Neolithic.

At the other end of the Clava complex is another chambered tomb, like the first, also open to the public. This view looks down the passage from ground floor level, into the central circular chamber. Note the ring of large stones round the cairn, holding it in position. This is very similar to the first cairn, which is just in front of the trees in the background.

At Clava, two main tombs are laid out, open to the visitor, one at each end of the complex. Both have their entrance passage pointing in the same direction, so that on Mid-winter's day, the rays of the setting sun point right down the passage. Between the two main cairns is a monument of a rather different type known as a ring cairn. Here there is no entrance passage, and at the centre, instead of a closed chamber there is an open unroofed area where ceremonies could take place.

The second stone in from the bottom left has some 'cupmarks' near the bottom, small circular depressions, laboriously carved out for some ritual purpose.

The recent radiocarbon dates show that the tombs were much later than expected: instead of being at the very beginning of the Neolithic, they come right at the very end, at around 2,000 BC. They also confirm that the whole cemetery was built at much the same time, in a single operation.

the older you were, the more important you were

Ahh, back in the good ol' days when teenagers didn't know it all.

Both have their entrance passage pointing in the same direction, so that on Mid-winter's day, the rays of the setting sun point right down the passage.

Of course it was all about religion and didn't have anything to do with trying to get the last bit of light inside in the days before electricity.

…you might conclude that ancient people, spending well over 95% of their waking time on survival in a hostile world, still had time to be the most religious people in history.

Survival in a hostile world is precisely why religion would have been important to ancient peoples and religions and rituals that centered on the sun and moon and the seasons would have made sense.

Absent an understanding of science, they would have wanted and needed to believe that someone or something was controlling the rhythms of the life cycle they observed and that these forces could be appealed to or appeased in order to ensure the sun really would continue to come up every morning, the long cold winter would end, the plants would grow and the animals they hunted would be plentiful.

Neolithic and Bronze Age people put a lot of time and effort and resources into the burial of their dead and often buried everyday or sentimental objects with the deceased and the burial mounds and chambers and stone circles became larger and more complex over time. The burials themselves are evidence of some type of belief in an afterlife and therefore religion.

The later ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the cult of death and the afterlife and spent a lot of their resources on religious ceremonies and rituals, mummification and their greatest building projects, the Pyramids were basically highly sophisticated and engineered burial mounds and their culture developed and thrived for a long time. But I’m sure that every day life for the average ancient Egyptian was hard, brutal and short. The change of seasons and predicable events like the flooding of the Nile was also very important to their survival and also played a big part in their religious beliefs.

In the European Middle Ages, the building of Cathedrals was a major undertaking and took a lot of time, money and resources but yet again, the world for everyday people was still pretty hostile yet they were by our modern standard, very religious.

And as earlier people became less nomadic, started cultivating crops and formed permanent settlements, religion and ritual would also have provided structure and cohesiveness to communities and perhaps early concepts of law and justice and governance.

Just my hypothesis, but I can envision that gatherings that some presume to be purely religious ceremonies may have also been practical and important community meetings where the leaders (elders, chiefs, priests, etc.) made and communicated their plans and decisions, heard grievances and settled disputes, etc.

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