Medieval Burials in Neolithic Dolmen Studied

ANTEQUERA, SPAIN—According to a Phys.org report, Marina Silva of the University of Huddersfield and her colleagues examined two medieval burials in the Menga dolmen, a 5,000-year-old monument in southern Spain. The structure, which features a long chamber and an access corridor covered with an earthen mound, was used as a burial site during the Neolithic period. Pottery and human remains found at the site indicate that burials at the Menga dolmen continued periodically, however. Silva and her colleagues studied two separate burials, one dated to the eighth century and the other dated to the eleventh century A.D. At this time, this area of southern Iberia was under Islamic rule, but Christian, Jewish, and perhaps pagan communities lived in the region. Using DNA analysis, the researchers were only able to recover data from one of the individuals, who was found to have a mix of European, North African, and Levantine ancestry. Yet both sets of remains were found to have been positioned in the graves in a similar way, with heads lying on the right side, pointing to the southwest, in line with the dolmen's symmetry. And although the medieval burials may have been Islamic, the alignment of the dolmen differs from Islamic cemeteries in the region. “Whoever these two individuals were—and regardless of what faith they practiced—the fact that they were both given inhumations aligned with the axis of a megalithic monument, in a site of remarkable prominence in the landscape of Antequera, approximately two centuries apart, highlights the continuity of Menga as a symbolic location for over 5,000 years—and possibly even longer—well beyond the Neolithic period,” the researchers concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. To read about dolmen burials near Granada, go to "Iberian Gender Imbalance."