I've felt for a long time that we have no good idea of the purpose of the stones to their erectors. My feelings come from the wild diversity of types of sites: tiny little statue menhirs, huge stones; rings, squares, lines; henges, cursuses, avenues; aggregations and isolated sites; huge barrows and tiny cists; rock art and plain stones; in one place thousands of years of use and reuse but over there a one-time erection. There's just so much stuff and such a long time span it's difficult for me to believe I'm looking at some "monolithic" culture phenonenon that had an agreed on meaning and use over all that time and space.

Our modern culture has definitely projected our own concerns and the concerns of anthropologically studied cultures back onto the past. In some very limited instances the latter may have some relevance; the former is problematical indeed!

Visiting the sites has been informative in that it's shown Loie and me what a melange of phenonena is still available for seeing. Visitng museums associated with the sites, and with their cultures in general has probably been more informative. I think we can see "culture" more readily in small objects than in large. So many questions come to my mind when visiting the sites. Does this place look the same as it did when it was built and used? Was it surrounded by an impenetrable forest that blocked all views? Or vice versa, for that matter. Is it now so wrecked we can't really imagine what it looked like then? Because Loie and I are poorly informed visitors, or because archaeology has missed something, are we missing seeing the one element that was most important to the builders? I think we've come away from our travels with many more questions than answers!