The Chronology of the French Collective Tombs

Abstract

The surveys of the megalithic tombs of France made by Bertrand (1864; 1875), the Sous-Commission des Monuments mégalithiques, Adrien de Mortillet (1901), and Joseph Déchelette enabled maps to be made which showed the essential features of the distribution in space of the thousands of prehistoric collective tombs in France. Déchelette listed a total of 4457 dolmens and allées couvertes: fresh regional surveys and fieldwork in the fifty years that have elapsed since the publication of the first volume of his Manuel d'archéologie préhistorique, celtique et gallo-romaine in 1908 have increased this figure to between five and a half and six thousand tombs. This quantitative increase, however, has in no way altered the qualitative picture of the distribution in space of the megalithic tombs in France, implicit in Bertrand's original essay, and explicit in the analyses of Déchelette and Adrien de Mortillet.Bertrand had emphasized that the ‘dolmens’ of France occurred mainly west of a line from Marseilles to Brussels; Adrien de Mortillet's map stressed the main axis of distribution, namely from Brittany to the Gulf of Lions, and the very large numbers of megalithic tombs that exist in the six departments of the Ardèche, Lozère, Aveyron, Gard, Hérault and Lot.