and removed by quarrymen for building materials. Inside were found human bones, urns, axes and a polished stone pendant. The local farmer who was responsible for the blasting then used the remaining upright stones as a pigsty until it was reclaimed as a historic site. Le Couperon This is a gallery grave in the Parish of St Martin. Le Couperon is about an eight-meters long capstoned chamber that a long mound had originally covered. It was surrounded by a ring of eighteen outer stones, known as peristaliths. It was well-known at least as early as 1748 as Daniel Defoe mentions it in his tour guide to Great Britain. The site was first excavated in 1868. By that time the capstones had fallen into the chamber. The excavators lifted these and a porthole stone, and restored the dolmen to what the excavators believed was its original form. Unfortunately, a farmer digging up the mound had scattered the peristaliths. In 1919, the Société Jersiaise moved the porthole stone to its current position at the eastern end of the chamber. However, archeologists believe that originally porthole stone may have stood within the chamber, dividing it into two segments of unequal length, each with its own entrance. Finds at the site included a few flint flakes and pottery fragments. The dolmen stands within a few metres of the Le Couperon guardhouse, which was built in 1689, and which for more than a century off-and-on housed the garrison of a nearby battery. Archaeological ages table Beaker People or Culture? When Jacquetta Hawkes wrote "The Archaeology of the Channel Islands", she mentioned "the Beaker people" who spread across Europe, possibly from the Iberian peninsula. They were defined by a distinctive pottery style - a beaker with a distinctive bell-shaped profile - that spreads across the Western continent around 2000 B.C. Burial customs of the Beaker people included placing their dead in round barrows, often with a beaker, perhaps to hold a drink for the dead on their final journey. Evidence of such beakers and artefacts have been found in Jersey at Ville ès Nouaux. The existence of the migratory "Beaker people" is still very much the popular position. Richard R. Doornek writing in the magazine "School Arts" in 1989 on Stonehenge mentions that about 2100 BC, "the Beaker people, named after their highly sophisticated pottery, arrived in Britain from the Continent through the Low Countries. Geoffrey