Supporting the idea that megalithery pre-dates farming (in the conventinal sense), is the fact that Aboriginal Australians raised megalithic stuctures. They didn't farm the land, unless you count deliberate starting and guiding of bushfires as farming.

On the subject of Balkan figurines, Marija Gimbutas' Gods and Godesses of old Europe, shows a lot of Vinca (?) faces, which display serious temporal lobe influences.

I am not sure about 'tombs', but I would say that standing stones probably predate agriculture. Although they have been discussed as being boundary markers and 'site of battle' markers one thing they are very good at (it's a bit of a theme in all explanations) is marking a point with a kind of permanance. "This is a good place to cross this mountain range." "There's good eating around here." "Stig woz 'ere" etc.

I would imagine that Mesolithic man needed to mark good (or bad) points in the landscape and would have soon realised that you can't necessarily have relied on 'somewhere near that birch tree'.

Carrowmore has very large implications for the way we view these folks. I believe (as do many others) that the builders of these ancient temples were not farmers in the sense we imagine them to be. A Lapp-like herdsman society could have existed or they could have relied simply on hunting and fishing - the middens show that it was a very rich area.

Just around the corner in Mayo are the Ceide Fields: a Neolithic field system. The plot thickens! This showed tremendous organisation, with two field strips per house, probably indicating that a primative rotational system was in operation. These date to around 2000BCE - a full 3000 years later than some of Carrowmore. That's a lot of time to develop agriculture in, but it's very unlikely that full-on agriculture was in operation for all that time - so, that would indicate that the builders of Carrowmore probably weren't farmers.

I don't believe that the Portal Tomb builders were agriculturalists either. I do think that the Court Tomb (and therefore Clyde Cairn) builders became the first agriculturalists, as indicated at Ceide.

Next question from someone will be: Aren't portal tombs 1500 years younger than court tombs? And I would say "yes, interesting isn't it!" :-)

"Doesn't this rather undermine one of Mr. Cope's central arguments, in the Modern Antiquarian? Namely, that as monuments celebrating agriculture megaliths symbolise the beginning of the error that is currently destroying the world. "

He is more aware of the pushing back of the dates than I am. I'm sure Driver is a constant forward thinking machine.

"The other question that this begs, for me, is just what it was that inspired the building of megalithic structures. What changed people, giving them monumentality, if it wasn't agriculture?"

As I said, settling. Settling IS nearly always agriculture, but NOT always. Besides, I still support the view that 99% of megalithic sites were created by farmers.