page_title: Caixa de Rotllan
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Caixa de Rotllan / History
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Gravure représentant le dolmen Caixa de Rotllan à Arles-sur-Tech
context_page_description: The Caixa de Rotllan is a dolmen in Arles-sur-Tech, Pyrénées-Orientales, southern France, dating back to the Neolithic period, during the second half of 3rd millennium BC.
  A legend holds that Roland lived in Vallespir and that, after his death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, his horse Veillantif carried Roland's corpse back to Vallespir and buried him under this dolmen. Dolmens are actually tombs, but they were erected many centuries before the legendary knight's adventures.
  The Caixa de Rotllan is made of three upright stones in a H-shape, supporting a thick roofing stone and delimiting a rectangular, medium-sized chamber. The entrance faces south-east, as do many other dolmens in Pyrénées-Orientales. The building has been listed as a Monument historique since 1889 but has never been excavated by archaeologists.
context_section_description: The Caixa de Rotllan may have been erected during the Chalcolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age, during the second half of the 3rd millennium BC.
  During the Middle Ages it marked the boundary between Arles and Montbolo. The current boundary between these two communes runs very near the dolmen.
  The first paper that mentioned this dolmen was an article written by Jean-Baptiste Renard de Saint-Malo in 1837 and entitled Monument druidique (entre Arles et Batère) ("Druidic monument between Arles and Batère"). But Renard de Saint-Malo seems to have confused the Caixa with another stone, the nearby palet of Roland. Louis Companyo's Histoire naturelle du département des Pyrénées-Orientales ("Natural History of the Pyrénées-Orientales Département"), in 1861, corrected this mistake, noting that the palet is not a dolmen and warning its readers against the frequent confusion between some natural stones and dolmens. ·  The first scientific description of the Caixa was made by Alexandre-Félix Ratheau in 1866, in «Note sur un monument celtique du département» ("Note On A Celtic Monument Of The Département") published in the Bulletin de la Société agricole, scientifique et littéraire des Pyrénées-Orientales. At this time, people thought that dolmens had been built by the Celts. In his paper, Ratheau, a French engineer and author of several books on fortications, recorded the dolmen's dimensions, its orientation relative to the north and a plan with three elevation cuts. Ratheau said that the palet was made of pieces of abandoned granite grindstones and clarified Companyo's correction. Indeed, reading Companyo's paper, people may have thought that no Caixa de Rotllan dolmen existed. In 1887, an engraving, made from a photograph, of the dolmen was published in La création de l'Homme et premiers âges, by Henri Raison du Cleuziou. In 1889, the Caixa de Rotllan was classified as a Monument historique.
caption: « Dolmen au pied du Canigou » ("Dolmen down the Canigou") in La création de l'Homme et premiers âges, 1887.
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