Dolmen

The Seven Wonders of the World include sites such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Wall of
China, and Stonehenge in England among others. However, Korea’s dolmens are no less mysterious.
About half of all the dolmens in the world or around 40,000 dolmens have been found on the Korea
Peninsula.

Diverse artifacts, including human bones, stone objects, and jade and bronze artifacts, have been
unearthed from the dolmens. The construction methods are hard to guess, and the existence itself still
remains a mystery.

The dolmens are classified into table-type and go-board dolmens, depending on their shape. The former,
mainly found in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, was made by positioning four stones to make
the walls of a box, which were then capped by a stone lying on top of the supports. The latter is
characterized by underground burial with stones that supported the capstone. They are often seen in the
southern part of the Korean Peninsula.

Dolmens are often referred to as tombs, but it is difficult to conclude that they are. Yi Gyu-bo, a great
scholar of Goryeo in the 12th century, left the following remarks about dolmens: “People say that the
saints put the dolmens there in the olden days. It is indeed a wonderful technique (that enabled men to
position such huge rocks in that way).”

In the early 20th century, American missionary Horace Grant Underwood claimed that dolmens were not
tombs but rather that they were put there for sacrificial rituals offered to the gods of the earth. Korean
folklorist Son Jin-tae claimed it was an altar pointing to a folktale in which dolmens were believed to be
the houses of witches (Mago halmeoni in local legends).

Dolmens are rarely found in China, except for Manchuria, or Japan, yet many thousands of them can be
seen across the Korean Peninsula. They were erected over many thousands of years, but this process
stopped sometime before the Common Era.

As this became known, scholars around the world are paying attention to the importance of Korean
dolmens in terms of the whole cultural history of mankind. Dolmens in Ganghwa (Incheon), Hwasun
(Jeollanam-do), and Gochang (Jeollabukdo) were listed as the UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2000. In
addition, many experts have been studying the correlation between dolmens in South Korea and ones in
Europe and India, other than the reasons why dolmens are concentrated on the Korean Peninsula.