Chambered long barrow

Chambered long barrows, also known as megalithic long barrows or chambered tombs, were a style of monument constructed across Western Europe in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, during the Early Neolithic period. Typically constructed from earth and stone, they represent the oldest widespread tradition of stone construction in the world.

The long barrows consist of an earthen tumulus, or "barrow", with a stone chamber in one end. These monuments often contained human remains interned within their chambers, and as a result are often interpreted as tombs, although there are some examples where this appears not to have happened. Across Northern Europe, and overlapping with the chambered long barrows in some regions, were unchambered long barrows; the relationship between the two remains an issue of debate but may have been more to do with the availability of local materials however than any cultural differences.

The earliest examples developed in Iberia and western France during the mid-fifth millennium BCE. The tradition then spread northwards, into the British Isles and then the Low Countries and Southern Scandinavia. Each area developed its own regional variations on the chambered long barrow tradition, often exhibiting their own architectural innovations. The purpose and meaning of such barrows remains an issue of debate among archaeologists. One argument is that they are religious sites, perhaps erected as part of a system of ancestor veneration or as a religion spread by missionaries or settlers. An alternative explanation views them primarily in economic terms, as territorial markers delineating the areas controlled by different communities as they transitioned toward farming.

Around 40,000 chambered long barrows survive today. Many have been excavated by archaeologists, from whom our knowledge about them derives.

Given their dispersal across Western Europe, chambered long barrows have been given different names in the various different languages of this region. One of those to have achieved international usage has been "dolmen", a Breton word meaning "table-stone". The term "barrow" is a southern English dialect word for an earthen tumulus, and was adopted as a scholarly term for such monuments by the 17th century English antiquarian John Aubrey. Synonyms found in other parts of Britain included low in Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire, tump in Gloucestershire and Hereford, howe in Northern England and Scotland, and cairn in Scotland.

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