Why so many prehistoric monuments were painted red

Humans

Megaliths, or huge stones, were used for thousands of years to build monuments, and they were far more colourful than you might think – the most common pigments used to decorate them came from reddish cinnabar and ochre

By Michael Marshall

Dolmen of menga, a megalithic burial mound in Spain

imageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ancient Greek statues weren’t always plain white marble. Many of these sculptures were actually painted in vivid colours. However, most of the pigments have either eroded away or been scraped off by overzealous museum curators, leaving us with just the underlying white stone.

For example,…

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