{"it":{"id":"EUR-GAV","kind":"site","sub":"Europe","name":"Gavrinis passage tomb","place":"France","lat":47.574,"lon":-2.898,"date":"c.4200-4000 BC (INTERPRETATION)","mat":"granite slabs, cairn","nfacts":6,"tags":["Europe","Megaliths"],"sum":"Almost every stone in the passage and chamber of Gavrinis, in Brittany, is carved with swirling lines, arcs and zigzags. It was built around 4200 to 4000 BCE, older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid.","why":"A Breton passage tomb covered in carvings, roofed with a broken piece of an older monument.","src":[430],"nsrc":2,"yt":"What did the patterns mean?","rel":["NEW-NEW","EUR-003"],"hook":"Gavrinis's capstone is part of a 14 m carved stone, broken and moved over 4 km to roof a tomb."},"S":{"430":["Wikipedia: Gavrinis","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrinis"]},"rec":{"id":"EUR-GAV","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"chamber","a":"width","v":"~2.5","u":"m","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3436"},{"f":"chamber","a":"slabs","v":"~50","u":"count","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3437"},{"f":"ceiling slab","a":"mass","v":"~17","u":"t","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"as stated","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M3438"},{"f":"tomb","a":"built","v":"c.4200-4000 BC","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3439"},{"f":"tomb","a":"sealed","v":"c.3000 BC","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3440"},{"f":"slabs","a":"reuse","v":"some in secondary use (1984 finding)","u":"text","o":"","unc":"","by":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","yr":"2026","m":"derived","c":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568","b":"S","bb":"","t":"INTERPRETATION","n":"","id":"M3441"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"height","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"largest_block","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"slope_face_angle","r":"no published face/slope angle in sources reached (often n/a for non-pyramidal sites)"},{"a":"wall_batter","r":"no published batter survey in free sources"},{"a":"orientation","r":"no published azimuth reached"},{"a":"corner_precision","r":"no published precision survey in free sources"},{"a":"levelness","r":"no published levelling survey in free sources"},{"a":"rock_type","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"geochem_petro","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"quarry_source","r":"not found in free sources reached"},{"a":"mortar","r":"dry-stone construction or no binder analysis in free sources"},{"a":"tool_marks","r":"no tool-mark study in free sources reached"},{"a":"dating","r":"no absolute date extracted"},{"a":"coords_elevation","r":"no elevation row yet"},{"a":"volume_labor","r":"no volume/labour estimate in sources opened"},{"a":"construction_phases","r":"no phase sequence in sources opened"},{"a":"lab_date_material","r":"no lab date with dated material in sources opened"},{"a":"hydrology_acoustics","r":"no published hydrology/acoustic measurement in sources opened"},{"a":"magnetic_radiation","r":"no published magnetic/radiation survey found (searched site name + magnetometry/radiation; Wikipedia, Google Scholar snippets)"},{"a":"metals_clamps","r":"no metal/clamp evidence reported in sources opened"},{"a":"excavation_history","r":"no excavation history row yet"},{"a":"artifacts_found","r":"no finds row yet"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA068","a":"advanced megalithic engineering","who":"see anomaly_claims","main":"Neolithic passage tomb","ms":"","st":"no data","n":"no AA-specific claim opened","nl":4}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"c.4200-4000 BC (INTERPRETATION)","dm":"historical/stylistic (INTERPRETATION)","lab":"NO","weak":"no lab date opened","unesco":"","dens":"STUB"},"co":{"lat":"47.57389","lon":"-2.89778","src":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q1496494)","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"Wikidata/enwiki (Q1496494) vs OSM way 500298935 delta 0.0003 deg","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/500298935"},"src":[{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia Gavrinis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavrinis&oldid=1364713568"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Gavrinis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrinis"},{"id":"VEUR-GAV-3","t":"The large stele at the Table-des-Marchands and at Gavrinis | Mégalithes","u":"https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/megalithes/en/large-stele-table-des-marchands-and-gavrinis"},{"id":"VEUR-GAV-4","t":"Discover - Cairn de Gavrinis","u":"https://cairndegavrinis.com/en/discover/"},{"id":null,"t":"Ministère de la Culture, Mégalithes du Morbihan: Gavrinis, Internal architecture","u":"https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/megalithes/en/internal-architecture"},{"id":null,"t":"Ministère de la Culture, Mégalithes du Morbihan: Gavrinis, External architecture","u":"https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/megalithes/en/external-architecture"},{"id":null,"t":"Ministère de la Culture, Mégalithes du Morbihan: Gavrinis, History","u":"https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/megalithes/en/history-0"}],"sum":"\"Covered with bizarre designs.\" That was how the writer Prosper Mérimée described, in 1836, the stones inside a mound on a small island off the Breton coast. He meant curves, chevrons and zigzags, cut into almost every stone that lined its dark passage. He could not have known that the most remarkable carving of all was directly over his head, on the upper face of the roof slab, hidden inside the mound where no living eye had been meant to see it for nearly six thousand years.\n\nThe island is Gavrinis, an uninhabited outcrop of granite about 750 by 400 metres in the Gulf of Morbihan, in southern Brittany, reached today by boat from Larmor-Baden. Its highest point commands the waters around it, and on that point stands a cairn, a mound of dry stone more than 50 metres across. The name is popularly read as \"goat island,\" but that is probably wrong. Documents of 1184 and 1202 call it Guirv Enes and Guerg Enes, and the old Breton word is related not to goats but to words in Welsh and Old Irish meaning \"wrath.\"\n\nInside the mound a passage 14 metres long, about 0.8 metres wide and 1.5 metres high, leads to a single, nearly square chamber about 2.5 metres across and 1.7 metres high. That is a corridor a grown person walks stooping, ending in a room the size of a small kitchen. The chamber is built of about 50 slabs. The passage walls are lined with upright stones, and the site's managers say the 29 slabs inside are almost all engraved, calling the place \"the Sistine of the Neolithic\"; another account counts 23 of 29 carved. The motifs include axes, staffs or crooks, bows and spirals, a common horn shape that may stand for cattle, and a shield-like figure that may be a very stylised human, all set among concentric arcs, lozenges and snaking lines. It is one of the great treasuries of megalithic art in Europe.\n\nIt is also very old. The managers date its building to between 4250 and 4000 BC. France's Ministry of Culture sets a floor on that: flakes of a dolerite quarried at Plussulien only from 4200 BC onward lie at the foot of the facade, so the cairn \"can not have been built before that date.\" Either way, Gavrinis is older than Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid, and it belongs to the same world as the passage tombs of Brú na Bóinne in Ireland and Maes Howe in Orkney. When it was built, the gulf was not yet the sea it is now, and the island looked over the deep channel of the Vannes river.\n\nThe building was planned with startling care. Excavation from 1979 to 1984 under Charles-Tanguy Le Roux showed a cairn raised in two stages. At its heart is a squarish mound with rounded corners and dry-stone faces leaning inward, the mass divided inside by walls into separate ranks, and the chamber sits at the exact centre of that first cairn and its system of faces. The ministry concludes that the plan \"must have been carefully drawn on the ground before the work began.\" The tops of several uprights were cut so that the roof would lie level. The south-eastern facade, about 30 metres long, curves inward at the centre as though to shelter the entrance.\n\nThen, at some point, someone closed it forever. Posts and a light wooden structure in front of the facade were burned, and a radiocarbon date places the fire between 3400 and 2900 BC. Straight afterward the facade and entrance were buried under stone and sand, raising the volume of the mound from about 3,000 to about 5,000 cubic metres. The passage itself had been packed full of loose stone, which the ministry says \"can only have been done intentionally.\" Use seems to have ceased around 3000 BC. Windblown sand did the rest, and the monument became a hillock.\n\nNobody knows exactly who lay inside. The site's managers describe a tomb for selected members of the community, buried with prestige objects such as axes, jewellery and pottery. The ministry is more cautious. Monks lived on the island as early as the Middle Ages, and medieval graves were dug up there in 1885. The chamber was probably emptied in that era, and the passage was cleared between 1832 and 1835 by the island's owner, so the original contents are barely known. Legend says the chamber hid fugitives during the French Revolution. The Département du Morbihan has owned the site since 1961.\n\nThe greatest surprise came in 1984. Excavators found that the outer faces of some slabs, buried in the cairn, were also carved, in a different style from their inner faces. Those carvings must have been made before the mound was built, which means the slabs had already served as parts of earlier monuments. And when they cleared the top of the chamber's roof slab, they found carving and the marks of a break. On it are a bull, the long arched horns of another animal, and a motif often read as an axe, though one archaeologist, writing in 2000, has suggested it may be a whale, a mythic creature. The fracture cuts straight across the animal.\n\nThe rest of it is across the water. The ministry reconstructs a single great standing stone of orthogneiss, its signs almost 2 metres long, about 14 metres long when whole. Its lower part is now the ceiling of the Table-des-Marchands tomb at Locmariaquer, more than 4 kilometres away. A third piece may roof the Er-Grah chamber there, or, by another account, the Er Vinglé tomb. The stele may once have stood in the alignment linked to the Grand Menhir. The Gavrinis piece, which the managers put at more than 23 tonnes and another source at nearly 17, would have been floated across the Auray River.\n\nHere the hardest question becomes unavoidable. Why would a people break their own great monument and bury its fragments, carved side up and hidden, in the roofs of tombs? It may have been destruction, the toppling of an old order's idol by a new one; a 1983 French paper in the literature on Gavrinis bears the pointed title \"Les idoles qu'on abat,\" the idols that are struck down. It may have been reverence, carrying the stone's power into the new house of the dead. The sources do not settle it.\n\nThe sky does not settle much either. Many passage tombs are aimed at the sun, and Gavrinis is often compared with Newgrange in Ireland, where midwinter light floods the chamber. Here the ministry finds the axis lies slightly south of midwinter sunrise. Winter light reaches the foot of the passage wall but is blocked by the entrance lintel, so there seems to be no true alignment \"as in the Newgrange dolmen.\"\n\nWhat remains is the art, and its meaning has gone. The managers themselves ask what the axes, crooks and spirals symbolise. Across Brittany, Ireland and Orkney, people who left no writing shared habits of building and of carving signs into stone. Under the roof of the chamber, still unseen by visitors, a pair of horns runs into a broken edge. What were these people saying to one another across the sea, in a language of lines cut into stone, and who first taught it to them?","qs":["Gavrinis's capstone is part of a carved stone whose other piece lies 4 km away. Why would Neolithic people break and reuse their own monuments?","What did the horned animal mean to the people who carved it?","Why carve stones that would be hidden inside a mound?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_2.jpg/1280px-Cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_2.jpg","title":"Cairn de Gavrinis par drone - vue 2.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Pierre F631","cap":"Face sud du cairn de Gavrinis."},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Bougon_Gavrinis_repl2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bougon_Gavrinis_repl2.jpg","title":"Bougon Gavrinis repl2.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"The original uploader was Athinaios at English Wikipedia.","cap":"Image under GNU license from German wikipedia. Submitted by Joachim Jahnke, 2006 there: Bild:NOR1523.JPG","alt":"Gavrinis passage tomb"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e6/Cairn_Gavrinis.jpg/1280px-Cairn_Gavrinis.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cairn_Gavrinis.jpg","title":"Cairn Gavrinis.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"calaeco","cap":"Gavriniz, gant he c'harn brudet, savet war-dro -3500."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8c/Cairn_Gavrinis_entrance.jpg/1280px-Cairn_Gavrinis_entrance.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cairn_Gavrinis_entrance.jpg","title":"Cairn Gavrinis entrance.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Myrabella","cap":"The entrance of the Gavrinis cairn, on Gavrinis Island in the Gulf of Morbihan (Brittany, France)."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Cromlech_d%27Er_Lannic_et_cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_1.jpg/1280px-Cromlech_d%27Er_Lannic_et_cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_1.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cromlech_d%27Er_Lannic_et_cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_1.jpg","title":"Cromlech d'Er Lannic et cairn de Gavrinis par drone - vue 1.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Pierre F631","cap":"L'îlot d'Er Lannic et son cromlech vu du sud. En arrière-plan l'île de Gavrinis et son cairn, puis le port de Larmor-Baden."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"17","u":"t","h":"The ceiling slab","s":[163]},{"v":"4200 BC","h":"Among the world's oldest buildings","s":[163]},{"v":"Granite slabs, cairn","h":"Made of","s":[163]}],"hs":{"163":["Wikipedia: Gavrinis (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrinis"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/EUR-GAV.webp","w":1280,"h":853,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_2.jpg/1280px-Cairn_de_Gavrinis_par_drone_-_vue_2.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}