Apulia is the Italian region with the highest concentration of megalithic monuments and sites, particularly menhirs and dolmens, perhaps the most impressive forms of prehistoric architecture. The terms, which are of Breton origin, come from the word "men", meaning stone, joined either with "hir", meaning long or "dol", meaning flat, so we get "long stone" (menhir) and "flat stone" (dolmen).
We can only guess what the functions of the dolmens and menhirs were, and the scientists do not always agree: the hypotheses go from funeral monuments to idols to sun worship, from territorial demarcations to remnants of fertility rites, all used by peoples who lived first by nomadic hunting, then by amble farming, then by raising livestock.

Among the many megalithic forms of prehistoric architecture, menhirs are certainly the most mysterious and enigmatic ones: austere steles pointing to the sky, these monoliths come in all shapes and sizes, reaching ten meters or more in north-western Europe, towering above the rectangular-based prisms in Apulia which are almost always less than five meters high. They represent a sort of rite performed by men who had recently turned to agriculture, who embedded these stones into the rock to fertilize the earth.

Menhirs can be found all over the eastern part of Salento and are among  the finest in the world. There are around a hundred in Italy, eighty of them are found in Salento. The tallest in Italy is the San Totaro menhir, in Martano, 5.20 meters (... feet) .

Besides the phenomenon of the solitary standing stones, it is common, in Europe, to see groups of monoliths organized in complex structures, like lines (a famous case is that of Carnac, in France, with 2934 monoliths organized in 11/13 lines, 4 kilometers long), circles (called "cromlech" in Breton dialect), or in structures like those of Stonehenge in England, which are even more complex. 

The dolmen is the structure which has kindled the imagination of generations od visitors and scholars, the entrance to parallel dimensions, sacrificial altar on which fierce cults offered human blood to their gods, home to thousands of mythical creatures, shared table around which paladins gathered to celebrate their victories against the Saracen infidels, an altar with healing powers to protect against disease and infertility.

The Apulian dolmes are regular-shaped chambers used more likely as burial places, consisting of a series of upright stones with a large flat stone on top, which usually had a hole on the upper side pointing towards the polar star.

Unlike dolmens in other areas, these are lacking the dromos (a series of stones forming a corridor as an entrance), meaning they are more archaic, dating back to a period between the VI and V century BC.

Inside Romanelli Cave at Castro and in the Cave of the Deer at Porto Badisco there are wall paintings and graffiti of hunting scenes of the glacial period. The discovery of the body of a woman with an embryo in her womb buried in Ostuni about 25,000 years ago, has been of particular importance. Archeologists, scholars and a large number of tourists are becoming more and more interested in and charmed by this mysterious land which still preserves hidden treasures.