History
article | Reading time5 min
Take a step back in time and discover this unique prehistoric site !
A thousand years of history
Origins of the site
Do you know the history of this site built in the Neolithic period on this promontory overlooking the gulf ?
Go back 6,000 years to see the first monumental architecture in Europe, when people settled down thanks to agriculture and livestock farming...
The megaliths along the Atlantic seaboard were erected during the Neolithic period, a period of recent prehistory that spanned between 5000 and 2000 BC in Brittany.
This period saw the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, leading to the construction of more durable villages. A major change in lifestyle in the history of mankind took place during this period, with the transition from a predatory to a productive economy, and from nomadism to sedentarisation, reorganising the new society and establishing a social hierarchy throughout the period.
In addition to a high concentration of monuments - more than 500 have been recorded to date, not counting the sites destroyed by human activity over time - the Gulf of Morbihan - Bay of Quiberon sector is characterised by an unparalleled diversity of megalithic monuments.
To understand the significance of these monuments, it is important to remember that they are inseparable from their environment. They were built by our ancestors to mark and organise their territory on the shores of the Morbihan over the long term.
4 vents, Centre des monuments nationaux
A vast Neolithic complex
Three types of megalithDiscoverthree distinct types of megalithic architecture. All three bear witness to very specific engineering and know-how.
- The Great Broken Menhir, a monolith weighing more than 300 tonnes and standing 20 metres high, was a formidable task from the moment it was extracted several kilometres from Locmariaquer to the moment it was erected as part of an alignment of menhirs. This alignment, which has now disappeared, originally comprised 18 standing stones. Why it fell a few centuries later is still a mystery to researchers and locals alike.
- The Table des Marchands (Merchants' Table), with its typical dolmen architecture covered by a cairn, is an ancient burial site. The exceptional engravings inside are reminiscent of those on the Gavrinis cairn, just a few kilometres away as the crow flies.
- The Er Grah burial mound illustrates the quest for monumentality to celebrate great figures who have passed into posterity. A small vault is covered with materials to create a monument 140 metres long. The funerary objects found inside - axes and pendants - indicate that the deceased probably belonged to a Neolithic elite.
DR, Centre des monuments nationaux
Recent excavations
Data from recent research
The Locmariaquer site is one of the few large megalithic sites in southern Morbihan to have been the subject of recent excavations in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as digitisation analyses in 2000-2010.
Today, a study of the restorations carried out over more than a century is being carried out to gain a better understanding of the history of this architecture.
Reproduction Benjamin Gavaudo / CMN