Untangling megalithic typologies and chronologies in the Levant

The Levant comprises southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. These well-surveyed archaeological landscapes contain a miscellany of features that incorporate megalithic blocks in various ways. To 19th century explorers, these features recalled megalithic monuments in Europe, and they used European terms such as cromlech and dolmen to classify them. In so doing, early scholars embedded within the very lexicon they used the assumption that the megalithic monuments in Europe and in the Levant derived from the same cultural origins. This has cast a long shadow over the development of megalithic studies in the Levant, and its principal tenets still underlie models that envisage a ‘megalithic phenomenon’ that spanned the region from the Taurus mountains to the Yemeni coast in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. In contrast, recent approaches have attempted to contextualize megaliths within local cultural and topographic landscapes. Such studies have met with limited success, becoming mired in poorly defined megalith typologies that have obscured rather than clarified the boundaries between different megalithic traditions. By reviewing different approaches to stone-built dolmen tombs in particular, this paper unpacks the assumptions that form the scaffold of the so-called ‘megalithic phenomenon’ and suggests alternate taxonomic and contextual approaches that could lead us into new theoretical ground.