Statements in stone : monuments and society in Neolithic Brittany /

The title of this book refers to the megalithic stone burial chambers, pillars (menhirs), and alignments erected in Brittany from before 4000 BCE until nearly 2000 BCE by the local Neolithic population. These large stone momuments were emulated widely in western and northern Europe, but Brittany seems to be the homeland of this practice. Patton's book is the first detailed account of the Breton megaliths in English. The Channel Islands, rarely covered in such syntheses, and Normandy are also taken into consideration as these practices are put into their social and cultural contexts. The enthnographically derived model of the "Big Man" is invoked to explain the beginning of these monuments, closely associated with a trade in stone axes. Behind the ethnological models lurks a theory of dialectical, cyclical sociocultural change and systemic collapse, which according to Patton, a curator in the Isle of Jersey Museums Service, explains the megalithic career in Brittany better than does a model of evolutionary change by incremental transformations in lifeways. The archaeological evidence is clearly invoked, so that the book is comprehensible regardless of theoretical commitment. General readers; undergraduates; and above. R. M. Rowlett; University of Missouri--Columbia