The Passage Graves of Antequera, and Maes Howe, Orkney

Extract

Antequera, in southern Spain, is in the province of Malaga, a little more than twenty miles north of the city of that name, the nearest point on the coast. The town lies at the foot of the mountains, overlooking a large and fertile plain; while just outside it, near the road to Granada, are three tombs which are notable in several ways. Two of them are less than a kilometre distant, the third lies farther away in the plain itself (pl. liii, I).

Perhaps the most striking feature of this comparatively isolated group is their marked dissimilarity from each other in type, one being a good representative of the ' cupola tombs' of Iberia; another, a simple long megalithic chamber and antechamber, built on a large scale; while the third, with its holed stone entrances, recalls the allées couvertes of the Paris region.

One feature they share, however, which does not seem to have been satisfactorily recorded, namely that each is contained in a large round barrow. All three barrows are formed of natural hillocks which have been scarped and shaped to form symmetrical circular tumuli.