In all other cases the builders of the megalithic monuments buried their dead unburned.  Often the body was lying stretched out on its back, or was set in a sitting position against the side of the tomb; but most frequently it was placed in what is known as the contracted position, laid on one side, generally the left, with the knees bent and drawn up towards the chin, the arms bent at the elbow, and the hands placed close to the face.  Many explanations of this position have been suggested.  Some see in it a natural posture of repose, some an attempt to crowd the body into as small a space as possible.  Some have suggested that the corpse was tightly bound up with cords in order that the spirit might not escape and do harm to the living.  Perhaps the most widely approved theory is that which considers this position to be embryonic, i.e. the position of the embryo previous to birth.  None of these explanations is entirely convincing, but no better one has been put forward up to the present.

This custom, it must be noted, was not limited to the megalithic peoples.  It was the invariable practice of the pre-dynastic Egyptians and has been found further east in Persia.  It occurs in the neolithic period in Crete and the AEgean, in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe, and it is one of the facts which go to show that the builders of the megaliths were ethnologically connected, however remotely, with their predecessors in Europe.

At Halsaflieni, in Malta, we have perhaps examples of the curious custom of secondary interment; the body is buried temporarily in some suitable place, and after the flesh has left the bones the latter are collected and thrown together into a common ossuary.  That the bones at Halsaflieni were placed there when free from flesh is probable from the closeness with which they were packed together (see p. 111).  There are also possible examples in Sicily (see p. 79).  The custom was not unknown in neolithic days, especially in Crete.  It is still occasionally practised on the island and on the Greek mainland, where, after the dead have lain a few years in hallowed soil, their bones are dug up, roughly cleaned, and deposited in caves.

CHAPTER X

WHO WERE THE BUILDERS, AND WHENCE DID THEY COME?

Modern discussion of the origin of the megalithic monuments may be said to date from Bertrand’s publication of the French examples in 1864.  In this work Bertrand upheld the thesis that “the dolmens and allees couvertes are sepulchres; and their origin seems up to the present to be northern.”  In 1865 appeared Bonstetten’s famous Essai sur les dolmens, in which he maintained that the dolmens were constructed by one and the same people spreading over Europe from north to south.  At this time the dolmens of North Africa were still unstudied.  In 1867 followed an important paper by Bertrand.  In 1872 two events of importance to the subject occurred, the publication of Fergusson’s Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries, and the discussion raised at the Brussels Congress by General Faidherbe’s paper on the dolmens of Algeria.  Faidherbe maintained the thesis that dolmens, whether in Europe or Africa, were the work of a single people moving southward from the Baltic Sea.