[Illustration:  Fig. 15.  Section and plan of the Talayot of Sa Aquila,
               Majorca. (After Cartailhac.)]

[Illustration:  Fig. 16.  Nau d’Es Tudons, plan and section. 
               (After Cartailhac.)]

The naus or navetas are so named from their resemblance to ships.  The construction is similar to that of the talayots.  The outer wall has a considerable batter.  The famous Nau d’Es Tudons is about 36 feet in length.  The facade is slightly concave.  A low door (a) gives access through a narrow slab-roofed passage (b) to a long rectangular chamber (c), the method of whose roofing is uncertain.  All the naus are built with their facades to the south or south-east, with the exception of that of Benigaus Nou, the inner end of which is cut in the rock, while the outer part is built up of blocks as usual.  The abnormal orientation was here clearly determined by the desire to make use of the face of rock in the construction.  The naus seem to have been tombs, as human remains have been found in them.

Rock-tombs also occur in the islands.  The most remarkable are those of S. Vincent in Majorca.  One of these has a kind of open antechamber cut in the rock, and is exactly similar in plan to the Grotte des Fees in France (cf.  Fig. 12).

Prehistoric villages surrounded by great stone walls can still be traced in the Balearic Isles.  The houses were of two types, built either above ground or below.  The first are square or rectangular with rounded corners, the base course occasionally consisting of orthostatic slabs.  The subterranean dwellings are faced with stone and roofed with flat slabs supported by columns.  In each village was one building of a different type.  It stood above ground and was semicircular in plan.  In its centre stood a horizontal slab laid across the top of an upright, forming a T-shaped structure which helped to support the roof-slabs, but which may also have had some religious significance.  The stones which composed it were always carefully worked, and the lower was let into a socket on the under side of the upper.

CHAPTER VI

ITALY AND ITS ISLANDS

Italy cannot be called a country of megalithic monuments.  In the centre and north they do not occur, the supposed examples mentioned by Dennis in his Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria having been proved non-existent by the Italian Ministry of Education.  It is only in the extreme south-west that megalithic structures appear.  They are dolmens of ordinary type, except that in some cases the walls are formed not of upright slabs, but of stones roughly superposed one upon another.  On the farm of the Grassi, near Lecce, are what appear to be two small dolmens at a distance of only 4 feet apart; they are perhaps parts of a single corridor-tomb.  In the neighbourhood of Tarentum there is a dolmen-tomb