In Neolithic western Europe, large stones, or megaliths (from the Greek megas, "great," and lithos, "stone"), were used for construction of tombs, temples, rings, alignments, and stelae. The largest number of some fifty thousand megalithic monuments are in Spain and Portugal, France, Britain, southern Sweden, and northern Germany. The terms megalithic culture and megalithic religion have been applied to the massive stone monuments. However, neither a separate megalithic culture nor isolated megalithic religion existed. The culture that produced megalithic monuments was a part of the western European Neolithic and Aeneolithic (a transitional period between the Neolithic and Bronze ages). It consisted of a number of regional culture groups whose religion can be understood in the context of the gynecocentric Old European (i. e., pre-Indo-European) religion inherited from Upper Paleolithic times. Huge stones were used wherever they were readily available. Monumental architecture, motivated by religious ideas, emerged...