Making sense of funerary monuments and funerary practices

Abstract

• Megalithic chamber tombs – of widely varying shape and size – loom large in the visible traces of Scotland’s Neolithic, but they formed just one element in a diverse range of practices concerned with dealing with, relating to, and commemorating the dead. This lecture explores this diversity and draws out the regional and chronological trends that can now be discerned, thanks to our growing body of radiocarbon dates. It also attempts to understand the meaning and significance of funerary monuments, and to identify the ‘drivers’ for the specific trajectories of change that we see.