Classification of symbols
There are concrete and abstract signs.
In the Neolithic age, there is a vision of comic order. All the rites have to do the mother goddess, agriculture…
The “decorations” of pottery, weapons, jewels, amulets, gold, amber, statuettes correspond to religious concepts.
Abstract signs disappeared to anthropomorphic signs (=around the human corpse)
Objects are sometimes buried with the person in the grave: axes, swords…
The Bronze Age (2500 B-C): Neolithic religious principles.
In the Neolithic age which is the peak of the megalithic age:
-Agricultural cults of the season
- The development of astronomic observations
- The worship of the mother goddess (protector of the dead and nature)
- A strong powerful deep reaching religious feeling: cult of dead and celebration of the ancestors
The funeral stones are dedicated to the Gods but they tend to be dedicated to princes and great warriors.
The mother goddesses of the late megalithic age have breasts, they wear weapons….
The tendencies just described are confirmed in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal).
Various shapes drawn, painted in Megalithic Art
Two ways of looking at them:
- Figurative and non figurative or abstract and concrete.
- Men, animals and objects
-> Shields, escutcheon, solar symbols, vegetable things.
Today, art is the individual representation of individual perceptions. Art is showing individual perceptions. In the Megalithic Age, art is not separable from religion. It’s the expression of implicit doctrine.
There is a discontinuity between Megalithic art and rock art.
-References to burial customs
-References to the attitude of life style of the people
-References to astronomy for understanding the cruciform structures
-Features of the centre stones, curved stones around the tumulus
The ways the stones are set are determinant:
- Internal features: the stones disposed inside the Tumulus
-References to mythology
The tumulus is also architectural. Culture of the passage-tool people, uncertainty of human life