Jersey dolmens

Of their habitations, no trace remains; it is likely from the evidence found elsewhere that they had fairly basic wooden huts, sealed with mud and clay, which have been lost.

Possibly drawing from the Egyptian model, a tribe was imagined as labouring away to build a burial site of stone for a mighty chieftain, much as the workers in Egypt had done for the pharaohs.

Beliefs of ancient Egypt have survived in written form, and it seems clear that the embalmed body of the king was entombed underneath or within the pyramid to protect it and allow his transformation and ascension to the afterlife, and a place among the gods.

This is also completely unlike Celtic burials, where tribal chieftains were often buried with their chariots, and grave goods (though horses were apparently[according to whom?]

But with the dolmens, as Mark Patton has pointed out, the human remains found are few in number, and sometimes (as La Sergenté) non-existent.

The historian Ronald Hutton comes to much the same conclusion, that these sites were mainly used as religious centres, and each would have been a "focus for a group of scattered farms or a settlement, bonded as a clan or family" - very much a precursor to the idea of a "parish".

Mark Patton suggests that we can imagine the tribes coming together, for various significant times of the year, to celebrate in ritual the passage of the seasons.

Mark Patton (1987) noted that there was a considerable degree of variation in terms of funerary practices and how the dead were treated.

The original excavation in 1923 found a large amount of rubble within that was probably the fallen remains of a corbelled, bee-hive shaped vault.

It is sited on open land west of Le Parcq de L'Oeillière, with a line of sight to La Table des Marthes.

Consequently, while La Sergenté is the earliest passage grave in Jersey, it collapsed soon after its construction, because of the unsuitable building materials available, and was not repeated elsewhere in the Islands.

A neolithic passage chamber in the parish of St Ouen; it was largely ruined by quarrying prior to the initial excavation in 1929.

It is conceivable that these chambers had wooden roofs, but recent excavations at La Hougue des Géonnais [3] provided no evidence for this.

Assuming that the chambers were open, the cairns of these monuments cannot have covered the chambers whilst they were in use, and must rather have formed a sort of platform around an open ‘arena’.” A large flat granite slab at the western end of The Railway Walk where it meets La Rue de la Corbière.

Because of this it may have been allowed to stand by the side of the now disused St Helier to La Corbière railway, while so many other sites were partially destroyed for building material.

Anyone living in a fief became a 'tenant' paying rent to the church (usually a tenth of their grain crops) and working for an agreed number of days on the Seigneur's land.

The local farmer who was responsible for the blasting then used the remaining upright stones as a pigsty until it was reclaimed as a historic site.

However, archeologists believe that originally porthole stone may have stood within the chamber, dividing it into two segments of unequal length, each with its own entrance.

The dolmen stands within a few metres of the Le Couperon guardhouse, which was built in 1689, and which for more than a century off-and-on housed the garrison of a nearby battery.

When Jacquetta Hawkes wrote "The Archaeology of the Channel Islands", she mentioned "the Beaker people" who spread across Europe, possibly from the Iberian peninsula.

Richard R. Doornek writing in the magazine "School Arts" in 1989 on Stonehenge mentions that about 2100 BC, "the Beaker people, named after their highly sophisticated pottery, arrived in Britain from the Continent through the Low Countries.

Geoffrey Humphrys also writes on Stonehenge in the magazine "Contemporary Review" (1994), and again we hear that "about 2100 BC, the Beaker people are reckoned to have started erecting two circles of bluestones".

This is most succinctly summed up by Ronald Hutton: "One of the major developments in British archaeology during the past twenty years has been the loss of confidence by its practitioners in their ability to recognise the movement of peoples.

Thus, according to traditional archaeological practice, had modern Britain been an illiterate society then it would have been natural to have spoken of the invasion of the 'Washing Machine People' in the 1950s and large-scale Japanese immigration in the 1970s."

This individual was clearly a high status male, buried with copper tools and gold jewellery as well as beakers, and oxygen isotope analysis on his teeth indicates that he grew up in central Europe, possibly Switzerland or Austria.