Tracing the Megaliths, Through Time and Space

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Thousands of years ago, megaliths began to appear in Europe — standing stones, dolmens, stone circles. They vary from single stones to complexes like Stonehenge.

There are about 35,000 such monuments in Europe, many along the Atlantic coast of France and Spain, in England, Ireland, Scandinavia and throughout the islands of the Mediterranean. They attract both tourists and archaeologists, who have spent a century debating how the knowledge to build such monuments spread.