quired
direction, and wooden rollers are placed under the stone on this road.
Large numbers of men or oxen then drag the stone along by means of ropes
attached to it. Other labourers assist the work from behind with levers,
and replace the rollers in front of the stone as fast as they pass out
behind. Those who have seen the modern Arabs in excavation work move
huge blocks with wooden levers and palm-leaf rope will realize that for
the building of the dolmens little was needed except numbers and time.

The other method of moving the stones is as follows: a gentle slope of
hard earth covered with wet clay is built with its higher extremity
close beside the block to be moved. As many men as there is room for
stand on each side of the block, and with levers resting on beams or
stones as fulcra, raise the stone vertically as far as possible. Other
men then fill up the space beneath it with earth and stones. The process
is next repeated with higher fulcra, until the stone is level with the
top of the clay slope, on to which it is then slipped. With a little
help it now slides down the inclined plane to the bottom. Here a fresh
slope is built, and the whole procedure is gone through again. The
method can even be used on a slight uphill gradient. It requires less
dragging and more vertical raising than the other, and would thus be
more useful where oxen were unobtainable.

When the stones were once on the spot it is not hard to imagine how they
were set upright with levers and ropes. The placing of the cover-slab
was, however, a more complicated matter. The method employed was
probably to build a slope of earth leading up from one side to the
already erected uprights and almost covering them. Up this the slab
could be moved by means of rollers, ropes, and levers, until it was in
position over the uprights. The slope could then be removed. If the
dolmen was to be partly or wholly covered with a mound, as some
certainly were, it would not even be necessary to remove the slope.

Roughly speaking, the extension of megalithic monuments is from Spain to
Japan and from Sweden to Algeria. These are naturally merely limits, and
it must not be supposed that the regions which lie between them all
contain megalithic monuments. More exactly, we find them in Asia, in
Japan, Corea, India, Persia, Syria, and Palestine. In Africa we have
them along the whole of the north coast, from Tripoli to Morocco; inland
they are not recorded, except fo