For untold generations, prehistoric people venerated natural sites, but from around 6,000 B.C., when settled agriculture and animal husbandry began to supplant nomadic hunter-gatherer ways of life around the globe, many cultures started to build monuments of stone or earth. Key among these were standing stones. These were placed in groups, such as circles or rows, or erected as solitary pillars, ‘monoliths’ or ‘menhirs’. Some stones were used rough and ready, while others were shaped and smoothed ‘dressed’ - or engraved.
     We can find a great many surviving standing stones sites even if we ignore the full range of other megalithic (‘large stone’) monuments.
     In Africa, Morocco has Msoura, a site comprised of small stones surrounding a tall pillar stone; there are dozens of stone circles in Senegambia on the west coast, tall standing stones in central Africa, and hundreds of standing stones in Ethiopia, including a monstrous hundred-foot-tall monolith in the north of the country, with plain and engraved standing stones in the Soddo region to the south.
     In the Middle East, the Yemen can boast rows and rings of standing stones, while in Israel there is a standing stone complex in Upper Galilee. Parts of the Himalayan region, Pakistan, and India are scattered with standing stones. The Far East also has its share: in Japan, for instance, there is a set of concentric stone circles on the summit of the giant Tatetsuki mound at Okayama. Generally more recent standing stone sites occur in parts of south-east Asia and Oceania, including Malaysia, Borneo, and certain Pacific islands. The Moai, the giant sculpted stones of Easter Island, are the most famous of these.
     Although several civilisations in the Americas built in stone, standing stones as such are rare there. One example, though, is in the San Augustin region of Columbia, where sculpted stone uprights (‘steles’ or ‘stelae’) are accompanied by other megalithic structures. Another example is in the Yucatan, southern Mexico, where a cult existed that erected phallic-shaped stones ranging from two to seven feet in height. And in 2006, a stone circle of over a hundred granite blocks, each weighing several tons and placed upright in the ground, was unexpectedly uncovered in the Brazilian Amazon.

The European Stones

But it is north-west Europe where probably the greatest concentration of extant standing stones is to be found. Over five thousand survive in Brittany alone, primarily in extensive stone rows.
     Scandinavia possesses standing stone settings laid out in the shapes of boats as well as more recent monoliths sporting runic engravings dating from the Viking era.
     Ireland and the British Isles have an exceptional megalithic heritage, with sites of world renown like England’s Stonehenge, Avebury, and mysterious moorland stone rows, notably on Dartmoor.
     Literally thousands of ancient stones grace these islands.
     Recent archaeological discoveries indicate that timber circles preceded the era of European megalith building, or at least overlapped with it, and there is evidence that stones were initially handled like timber. At Stonehenge, for instance, there are mortise and tenon joints securing horizontal stone lintels on the upright sarsen megaliths, and some of the smaller bluestones in the monument, the first stones to be erected there, display tongue-and-groove work.
     Secrets of the Stones A standing stone site is always enigmatic, and a visitor can’t help but wonder, ‘What was it for?’ Archaeology has come up with some answers, if not them all.
     Certain monoliths seem to have been used as waymarkers for hunters or pilgrims, while others delineated tribal boundaries or were associated with fertility rites, being generally phallic in shape. Yet others, especially shaped or engraved stones, represented ancestral figures or tribal symbols. The Scandinavian rune stones commemorated famous people or events in the Viking era.
     A major function of standing stones worldwide seems to have been to mark astronomical events.
     The sun and moon alignments at Stonehenge are well known, but there are hundreds of lesser-known cases. For example, on Jura, an island off the west coast of Scotland, there is a range of mountains called the Paps (‘Breasts’) of Jura, on account of two prominent, rounded peaks in their midst. The midsummer sun appears to set into the Paps when viewed from a major standing stones group at Ballochroy on the mainland. A site near Loch Finlaggan on Islay, an island immediately to the south of Jura, further confirms the symbolic importance of these breast-like mountains in prehistory: a standing stone there is the survivor of a stone row which aligned to Jura’s two rounded peaks, visible in dramatic isolation on the skyline.
     A slightly different example is Callanish, an important group of stone circles on the island of Lewis, also off Scotland’s west coast. From the main Callanish site the eastern skyline is formed by the Pairc Hills, which resemble the form of a reclining woman. Sometimes called the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, her Gaelic name is Cailleach na Mointeach, the Old Woman of the Moors.
     Every 18.61 years, the time in the complex lunar cycle known as the Major Standstill, effectively a lunar ‘solstice’, the moon rises out of the Pairc range and skims the horizon to seemingly set amidst the standing stones in other parts of the Callanish complex. Such astronomical use of standing stones is probably best considered not as early science but rather as some form of Stone Age astrology or, even, displays of sheer ceremonial showmanship.
     Stone rows like those in Brittany or on Dartmoor do not align to any significant astronomical bodies, and their purpose remains a mystery. They are almost always associated with burial sites, though, so perhaps they acted as ‘spirit paths’.
     Occasionally, natural rocks (including calcite deposits in caves) with unusual properties were used like standing stones, often having rock art or carving applied to them. The Saami of Lapland and some American Indian tribes felt rocks with odd shapes or suggestive of human or animal forms were where spirits dwelled.
     Some rocks, too, make natural musical sounds when struck and would have been understood in the same way. It is interesting that the Welsh source area of the Stonehenge bluestones has recently been found to possess a high percentage of musical rocks.

Magical Memories

A kind of memory of unusual animate or energetic properties being credited to standing stones survives in various folklore motifs. The stones forming the King’s Men circle at Rollright, near Oxford, England, for example, are said to be uncountable, while a stone in a circle at Sanguli, Gambia, was supposedly inhabited by a genie with a bag of gold.
     And legends of stones that move at night when no one is looking are legion. Also, some standing stones, such as those at Stonehenge, have long been said to possess healing virtues.
     Given such deep, ages-old beliefs in the special properties of standing stones, it could be significant that the Dragon Project, a research effort started in 1977 to investigate anecdotal accounts from visitors reporting strange energy effects at megalithic sites, did find magnetic, radiation and ultrasound anomalies in some instances.
     The ancient stones still standing around the world testify to enormous effort on the part of our remote ancestors in the service of beliefs and perhaps represent knowledge we no longer recognise or understand.

© Paul Devereux, 2008.

All photographs © Paul Devereux. Paul Devereux is not a Freemason but has an interest in spiritual traditions and subjects on which he has written many books. He is one of the two Managing Editors of Time & Mind, an academic journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture.
See timeandmind.bergpublishers.com and www.pauldevereux.co.uk