Passage grave
type of neolithic tomb made of large stones
A passage grave or passage tomb consists of one or more burial chambers covered in earth or stone and having a narrow access passage made of large stones. These structures usually date from the Neolithic Age and are found largely in Western Europe. When covered in earth, a passage grave is a type of burial mound which is found in various forms all over the world. When a passage grave is covered in stone, it is a type of cairn.
Construction and design
The building of passage graves was normally carried out with megaliths along with smaller stones. The earliest passage tombs seem to take the form of small dolmens, although not all dolmens are passage graves. The passage itself in a number of notable instances is aligned in such a way that the sun shines through the passage and into the chamber at a significant point in the year, often at sunrise on the winter solstice or at sunset on the equinox. Many later passage tombs were constructed at the tops of hills or mountains, indicating that their builders intended them to be seen from a great distance.
The interior of passage graves varies in number of burials, shape, and other aspects. Those with more than one chamber may have multiple sub-chambers leading off from the main burial chamber.
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This entry incorporates text from “Passage grave” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.