Jamie A. Fraser – Dolmens in the Levant

Abstract

Funerary megaliths in the Levant are a vast subject. Despite the discovery of thousands of monuments since the end of the 19 th century, their good visibility and accessibility due to low levels of sedimentation have led to the destruction of a considerable proportion of funeral deposits. Archaeologists have thus been forced to develop an approach relying mainly on morphology and the study of buildings.The publication reviewed here is the result of research carried out by J.A. Fraser for his doctoral thesis on dolmens in the Near East. The structure of the work resembles that of his thesis; both consist of two parts. The first part is further subdivided into six chapters (1 to 6) and is 176 pages long. The second part also contains six chapters (7 to 12) and is 163 pages in length. Between the two parts are 13 colour plates. The whole is extremely well supplemented, with 23 tables and 195 illustrations, most of which are sourced from archival images.Fraser uses the chapter 1 as an introduction where he expresses his founding idea: dolmens are monuments belonging to an uncommon funeral tradition among societies in the Levant in the 4 th century BC. By the morphological criteria he lists on p. 5, the author considers only a few megalithic monuments in the Levant other than trilithon dolmens to be "true" dolmens. The bulk of his study thus concerns itself with the latter type. This introductory chapter covers problems with the terminology surrounding, and the functions of, these monuments, their chronology and distribution, and his research site in the Wadi ar-Rayyan (Jordan).