It makes sense that barrows and things would be used before they became houses for the dead. This is why I have a problem with the dates put on burial chambers and stone monuments. Basing the age of something on the age of the corpse inside seems a bit silly to me; you could bury me in my house, it wouldnt make this Victorian house 28years old!
We don't have dates for builds unless there is a dateable deposit underneath the structure which can only provide a terminus post quem date , the dating otherwise has to be an assumption based on typology and guesswork .If you were buried in a Victorian house then we would at least know that the build date of the house predated the burial but a victorian house would provide an immense amount of info to help date it that we simply don't have with prehistoric monuments .
