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National Geographic : 1977 Nov
Contents
coast from Spain and Portugal to France, to the British Isles, right up to the Orkneys off the tip of Scotland, and to Scandinavia. The Spanish ones were particularly impor tant to the traditional theory of the tombs' ori gin. There are round tombs in Crete probably once roofed in the same way as the Spanish tombs, which could reliably be dated back to 2600 B.C. through their Egyptian connections. It was thought, therefore, that the Spanish tombs were the work of colonists from the eastern Mediterranean, who might have ar rived in Spain a little after 2600 B.C. The theory held that the tombs of France could be modifications of those of Spain and Portugal, and the British and Irish ones would have followed the French ones, beginning around 2000 B.C. The great tomb of Maes howe on Orkney, on the fringe of Europe, would come last, around 1700 B.C. But there was a problem here. The theory was clear and simple, and the evidence at times persuasive; those spirals at the temple of Tarxien on Malta did resemble the spirals on the grave slabs at Mycenae. But the Span ish tombs did not resemble their supposed predecessors in Crete all that closely. Further, when I really studied the artifacts of the Aegean early Bronze Age, of around 2600 B.C., I would find only very superficial resemblances to objects from the tombs in Spain. And a growing and disturbing number of radiocarbon dates indicated that many of the European structures were built not long after their supposed predecessors in the Near East, shrinking the time gap in which dif fusion could have occurred. I began to wonder if the theory of an in dependent invention of the European tombs might not be (Continued on page 621) 617
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