The Megalith Builders by Euan MacKie - 1977

BCA, 1977. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 6.5" x 9.5. H/B 208 pages, condition is very good. Huge chambered tombs, then circles and avenues of massive standing stones, at their most impressive at New Grange and Maes Howe or at Stonehenge and Carnac, were raised all along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe from Spain to the Orkneys some 5,000 years ago. These are the megaliths, mighty feats of engineering in any language, first created in Neolithic farming communities who, till then, had shown no other signs of the administrative and technical organization that such large-scale projects would have called for. In recent years the megaliths have been put down to purely local invention and it has been denied that the necessary architectural expertise may have been introduced by outsiders. But in this book Euan MacKie assembles fresh evidence from Carbon 14 dating, from analysis of evolving constructional styles in the tombs and from calculations of the standing stones' astronomical significance and re-assesses the diffusionist theory of a common source of expertise in the light of present-day studies of the way human societies develop. With this new insight into the minds of their builders, he proposes an ambitious new solution to the mystery of the megaliths.