European Anthropic Megalithic Transport Interactive Gazetteer

 

European anthropic megalithic transport is a new interactive gazetteer of every case in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Europe where a published petrographic or quarry match demonstrates genuine human transport of architectural stone — as distinct from a stone that arrived by ice, or one simply raised on the rock it was quarried from.

What it shows

Each entry is a matched pair: a monument and an identified source, joined by an arrow whose weight scales with the published distance. The map filters by region and by evidence quality (high vs medium confidence in the underlying source-matching), and carries a schematic overlay of ice-sheet margins — a reminder that in previously glaciated regions, a "close" erratic and a genuinely local outcrop are not the same thing.

A distance histogram sits alongside the map: a large peak under a few kilometres, and a thin tail stretching out to the exceptional cases — Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin to Stonehenge, the Orcadian Basin candidate source for the Altar Stone, Matarrubilla's palaeo-estuary haul at Valencina. Tapping a bar isolates that distance band on the map.

Stonehenge's four hauls can be switched off entirely with a "Not Stonehenge" toggle, so the rest of the European record — Brittany's orthogneiss, the Guadalquivir sites, Newgrange's quartz and greywacke, the Devil's Arrows' Millstone Grit — can be read without one monument dominating the picture.

Sourcing

Every line traces to a cited quarry-provenance study — petrographic, geochemical, or direct archaeological identification of an extraction site — not to tradition or inference from stone type alone. The underlying data is downloadable as CSV, and the full gazetteer lists sources and references for each entry. Corrections and additions, particularly for regions still thin on the map, are welcome via the GitHub repo.