Spiritual Heritages of Ancient Europe

More on megalithic cultures:

The people who raised the megalithic monuments in ancient Europe left a lasting presence on the landscape, and in folk tradition as well. Often these names refer to pagans, temples, witches, faeries or "devils," or sometimes they identify mythical or ancestral women like Boand or Berthe. The stories told about them often refer to pagan dances, assemblies, or refusal to attend Mass or otherwise submit to priestly authority. Or they speak of divine spinners who carry the megaliths on their heads or in their aprons, or powerful old women who hurl them from hilltop to hilltop.

Four or five millennia separate this folklore from the Ancients, and yet there is also a continuity in local communities by virtue of the constant presence of these great stones on the land. Modern genome studies show that invasions and migrations did not wipe out the oldest indigenous populations of Europe. Instead a significant proportion of the modern people bear signatures of the ancient foraging societies going back to the Paleolithic. And a sizeable proportion of Irish and British people are genetic relatives of the Basques.

Historical linguistics also tells us that over 30% of the words in modern Germanic languages have a non-Indo-European origin, and that a language closely related to Basque was spoken in Aquitaine (southwestern France) as late as the 6th century of our era. This is a very different history than what we have been given, and scholarship is shifting dramatically away from the notion of absolute conquest followed by a cultural wipeout of the conquered. This has big implications for what we are studying here.

There's a certain poetry to the names of these sites, mostly in marginalized languages and dialects of Europe: Sa Coveccada (Sardinia), Xarez (Portugal), Son Catlar (Menorca), Capacorb Vell (Mallorca), Tynaarloo (Netherlands), Gla (Greece), Mnajdra (Malta), Ker Lud (Bretagne), Tagarp Fem (Sweden), Vizbek Braut and Thuinne (Germany), Magheragharush and Farrananahinaneeny (Ireland), Antequera (Spain), Le Courderc (France), and Castelluccio dei Sauri, which is good Italian, but means Little Castle of the Lizards.