That’s great! I’m not surprised - the crook, the possible symbol of early pastoralism (post-Mesolithic), has been found in both Breton and Alentejan menhirs and cromlechs, which have got a strong likelihood to pre-date any other monuments according to the surprising archaeological evidence of the last few years.
You also touched a sensitive chord there. You know how Table des Marchands and Gavrinis also contain two pieces of the same Ur-menhir used as capstones of the former temple-graves (with animal rock art). That particular Ur-Menhir may have been originally 14 m long, in the huge Early tradition of the Menhir Brise!! The Brittany Temples are scary in the way they mushroomed up in such a pharaonic scale, so early and so suddenly some time in the Vth Millenium BC.
It is often that I think about the extent to which recycling of previous Ur-stones was practised. It must have been heavy and frantic. At the famous Dolmen of Dombate in Galicia, for instance, a previous smaller dolmen has been found where the one we know is standing now, in the way that christian churches were built on top of previous ones. I am sure that a few of the decorated uprights that make up the dolmens of Europe belonged to previous isolated complexes in the (quite possibly) Mesolithic landscape.
Another example is the Almendres stone circles made of double concentric rows of stone. The tiny one is the earlier one to which a later much bigger one was stuck. Both pre-date, in their cosmic Egg-shapes, all of the other surrounding Portuguese megalithic dolmens and sites, which are still Early Neolithic, and whose people re-used them perhaps totally losing the original meaning of the cromlechs. Continuity – YES! But there was much change and fussing about in the roughly 3,000 years before the Bronze Age which makes things extremely complex. And even then there’s Megalithic Art and Rock Art being two sides of the same coin, used in different contexts, sometimes contemporary. The petroglyphs were Early Bronze Age manifestations of an art which had existed on stones for quite a long time in the form of zigzags and paintings.
But the biggest cultural upheaval must have come with the Celtic migrations (and I must stress Celtic with C- in this case). Some petroglyphs in NW Iberia were used as the base for the walls of their settlements. They cared for them as much as we do nowadays, not knowing what the hell they were about. Perhaps the ‘primitive’ tribes that used them in their divinatory or shamanic endeavours were completely absorbed by a new 'more civilised' Iron tool-related religion. Oh and this is cracking - there is even evidence of Beaker vandalism in some megalithic monuments!!!! If we consider the early Beakers to have started their thumping about in places around 2,500 BC we can see the point of complexity.
I think contacts between Brittany, W.Iberia and Eire did definitely happen though perhaps not to the extent of vast human migrations. Although cynics may argue that motives like lozenges and zigzags, or even spirals and concentric circles are universal in all cultures, the similarity between the Irish, Scottish, Northumbrian and Galician famous petroglyphs with circles and radial lines is amazingly exact.
http://www.pangalaica.com/megalitismo/eng/pintura.htm
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