We can anticipate two lines of innovation in the MegaScapes project:
1) New trends on the megalithic location. A) The megalithic sites are preferentially located in areas of high visual prominence, and we argue that this has been one of the elements that marked the creation of the spatial structures in the Neolithic communities, i.e. their territories. B) The visibility of the megalithic sites should be linked to the movement through the landscape. From this perspective, the emphasis is not much on static visibility but a dynamic one that relates the landscapes, monuments, and society. From the project’s research, it is clear that the Neolithic communities used the megalithic monuments as artificial elements to structure and their particular landscapes. This is something not trivial but intended: a social partitioning of the landscape.
2) New models for the origin and expansion of Iberian megalithic monuments. The Iberian Peninsula is one of the main centres of the megalithic phenomenon in Europe, and the origin of the megalithic complex in this region has been a major topic in the archaeological debates since the XIX century. In the case of Iberia, these ritual constructions saw a rise and fall in their building with a peak dated approximately between 5,500 and 4,500 BP. In a paper that is currently being drafted, we conduct statistical analyses on the available radiocarbon record to investigate regional variations in the spatiotemporal patterns, as well as to determine the putative geographic origin of the megalithic architectures in the Iberian Peninsula. Our analyses suggest recurrent differences in the popularity of the megalithic architectures across space and time within the Iberian Peninsula and they identified the north-western areas (namely Galicia and North of Portugal) as the most probable source from which the megalithic phenomenon may have spread across Iberia. The results allow proposing a novel alternative view to the current explanatory model on the origin of the Iberian megalithic complex, traditionally set in the centre-south of Portugal as well as in other areas, by displacing the focus to the Iberian North-west. This model is then contrasted against two possible explanations: whether the funerary phenomenon could have emerged in the North-western areas as a local development or being imported as the result of maritime contacts with western France. Ultimately, this research brings again to discuss the pioneering explanatory models developed by archaeologists during the mid-XX century, contributing to a major change in the current understanding of the origins of the megalithic phenomenon in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe.
Some of those ideas were previously defined by other authors from a theoretical point of view, but MegaScapes has thrown light with statistical and quantitative modelling of Archaeological data. Questions for the future arise: are those trends common to other areas of Atlantic Europe? Are we facing possible common meanings extensible to the monumental landscapes of Atlantic Europe?
