Cup and ring mark

Cup and ring marks or cup marks are a form of prehistoric art found mainly in Atlantic Europe – Ireland (Complete), Wales, England (North), France (Brittany), Portugal, Finland, Scotland and Spain (Galicia) – and in Mediterranean Europe – Italy (North-West, Sardinia), Greece (Thessalia) as well as in Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden) and Switzerland (Caschenna site - Graubunden). Similar forms are also found throughout the world including Australia,Gabon, Greece, Hawaii, India (Daraki-Chattan), Israel, Mexico and Mozambique.

They consist of a depression, no more than a few centimetres across, pecked into a rock surface and often surrounded by concentric circles also etched into the stone. Sometimes a linear channel called a leads out from the middle.

The decoration occurs as a petroglyph on natural boulders and outcrops and also as an element of megalithic art on purposely worked megaliths such as the slab cists of the Food Vessel culture, some stone circles and passage graves such as the clava tombs and on the capstones at Newgrange.

The site of Atlit Yam, abandoned circa 6300 BCE and now under Israel's Mediterranean Sea coast south of Haifa, features cup marks engraved into megalithic stones, some of which are set upright to form a semi-circle which has been referred to as resembling the UK's stonehenge but smaller, with ceremonially buried bodies at the site, and potential alignments to the solstice, and/or to other stars, still being hypothesized as the site was only discovered in 2009 and undersea sites are difficult and expensive to explore. Further inland, dating to at least 3000 BCE (exposed) and estimated up to 4000 BCE (unexcavated layer, under the layer which is exposed), is Rujm el-Hiri, a cairn (tumulus) type of megalith, consisting of concentric circles (as cup marks also are concentric circles, but much smaller than Rogem Hiri) estimated to contain 40,000,000 kg of stones moved by humans, with an opening in the outer circle which aligns to the summer solstice (just as sites throughout Eurasia also align to solstices) and which has a burial chamber in the center, with thousands of dolmens nearby, a "dolmen" being a 3rd and younger type of megalith found elsewhere in Eurasia, the oldest of which, thus far, are found in the UK, but date only to the 3rd millennium BCE in Israel.

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