The Monuments - Historical Overview Part 1

The Monuments have influenced our history to a such a degree that they are fluidly integrated into it. The first tribes lived in the shadow of the towering Monuments, simply acknowledging them as part of their environment. They saw nothing unnatural about the Monuments simply because they had always been there. It was only later, after the first great civilizations arose and built temples and other grandiose constructs that we began to realize that the Monuments were artificial in nature. The first civilizations –notably the Mssa'po and the Fïïnyxans– all asserted that they were built by the gods. For what purpose the Monuments were created varied upon the civilization in question: to the Gerocs they were the forges of Etano; to the Maiia they were the houses of nature deities; to the Inqupak the transformed bodies of honored sentinel spirits. The theme of divinity was virtually universal: almost all cultures up until the 16th century CE revered them as definitively of spiritual nature (some tribes still do not regard them as anything other than natural). Indeed, some more pious factions of the modern day still retain the (erroneous) belief that the Monuments are holy.
In the mid-16 century, during the Western Illumination, scholars became aware that the Monuments were not divine, but quite obviously relics of some ancient and powerful civilization that reigned some time prior to the evolutionary arisal of our species. There was much speculation in the centuries that followed (the leading theory was that some sapient race had evolved many millions of years before us and then gone extinct), but due to steadfast cultural guidelines most Monuments were still off-limits to examination. Though these cultural barriers steadily weakened over the next few centuries, archaeologists did not begin properly investigating these structures until late in the 19th century CE, and even then, it was not a widespread subject.
Then in 1915, the mysterious explosion of a hitherto undisturbed Monument sparked a rush of archaeological research on the plastoid monoliths, fueled by popular concern as to whether they were dangerous...