Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
assembled by setting them on end inclined to one side. Succeeding rows are inclined
alternatively in opposite directions to produce an interwoven fabric known as
“herring bone” formation. Such an assembly with suitable stones is also stable set
dry stone. It is, of course, closely related to the introduction about the same time
of plano-convex mud bricks in Mesopotamia.
Further development in rubble masonry inevitably involves additional shaping
of the stones and is probably for the most part an af ect of i ne stone dressing.
It should be noted emphatically here that the manner of construction with i eld
stones discussed above refers to domestic building. h e stone units are portable
and the building operations can be carried out by one or two skilled men and at
the most several assistants. h e buildings are addressed to the material needs of
the living, and can be encompassed by a family group. It is an expression of that
secular progressive temperament which stands behind what is ot en termed the
Neolithic Revolution.
h e development in stone building which succeeded this in point of time is
momentously other. It is a mutation in every respect. It is not addressed to the
material needs of the living. It accomodates the dead and the destiny of the group.
It is momentous public building on the grandest scale. h e construction demands
the regimented highly organised resources of a sizeable community (a tribe, a clan),
and the direction of some men of great talents. h is megalithic building tradition
of Western Europe (centred on the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast
during the i t h to the third millenium BC) is one of the vicissitudes of history most
dii cult to account for. No stone building like it occurred previously anywhere in
the Ancient World, and previous building in the region was not stone at all, but
wood. Some complete change in human (social) values found direct expression
in stone building. In place of one or two men assembling together stones a few
kilos in mass, companies of men transported, set up, and raised up to consider-
able height units of stone many, many thousand times the weight of a typical
i eld stone. To what end? No man dwelt in such structures and they provided no
defence against hostile groups. Such construction was unknown in the Ancient
World prior to ca 5000 BC and was little practiced there again at er ca 2000 BC.
However the technology may be explained, the conceptual change involved is stu-
pendous—and this took place in a region reckoned to lag several millenia behind
the eastern part of the Ancient World! (C. Renfrew,
h e Enigma of the Megaliths
,
chap VII, Before Civilisation London, 1973; A. Sherrat, “h e Genesis of Megaliths
World Archaeology,” 22, 1990, pp. 148-65).
Megalithic masonry construction has been characterised here as it is generally
thought of—a homogenous and disassociated phenomenon: rude stone monuments
on a gigantic scale, dolmens and menhirs which have survived the millenia to
present a spectacle unlike any other building in the ancient world (G. Daniel,
h e
Mega-
lithic
construc-
tion
