The Neolithic Argonauts

Here is an extract from Chapter 5 of "The Bluestone Enigma"  pp 78-80.  It deals with the matter of maritime transport and the likelihood of 80 or so large bluestones being carried by water across the Bristol Channel.  Actually, the stones have many different geological provenances, but let that little matter pass for the moment.....

This might come in handy, given the renewed interest in recreating the "bluestone voyages" for a TV documentary to be filmed in August.


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Reference has been made above to the nature of the craft which might have been used by the Early Neolithic adventurers on their crossings of the Bristol Channel or the Severn Estuary.  It is also assumed that the seafarers had reasonable “mental maps” of the seaways they were using, and also considerable maritime skills.  Aubrey Burl, a seafarer himself, was not convinced:

There has been little serious consideration of the logistics involved in the hypothetical journey from Wales to Wiltshire. The most meticulous was by Richard Atkinson. In his scheme, the stones were brought by land and river to Milford Haven, floated along the shores of South Wales and up the Severn, and then taken by rivers and land-portage up to Stonehenge. He suggested the use of a pine raft with a crew of twelve. A modification of his description would envisage a tree-trunk platform about 6m square, constructed for buoyancy in three layers, each of 20 logs 6m long and 0.3m thick. With a dry weight of 35lb per 0.03m3 the logs would have weighed about 20 tons and the entire cargo of wood, stone and men over 30 tons. Whether this unwieldy craft was seaworthy and capable of being manoeuvred during the day and beached night after night by a small crew is doubtful.

On a floating platform without sails, with propulsion dependent on paddles and poles, with little control over steering, affected by every capricious current of the Atlantic Ocean and Bristol Channel, the kamikaze crews faced daunting challenges. Once out of the shelter of Milford Haven, almost immediately the voyagers would have encountered strong tides and under-tows across the dangerous waters surging southwards near Freshwater West. Tidal flows of three to five knots streamed on the east side of Carmarthen Bay, and beyond them were treacherous sandbanks at Cefn Sidan Sands. Between Carmarthen and Swansea Bays heavy currents swirled at every headland. A mile from the coast off Ogmore-by-Sea lay the reef of Tusker Rock on which many mechanically powered ships later foundered.

Even when the mouth of the Severn was reached the struggle was not done. The river could pour seawards at up to ten knots, there were submerged mudbanks, the highest rise and fall of tides anywhere in the British Isles, all this before the Bristol Avon was reached at Portishead. At that point the stone would have to be transferred to something more suitable for travel along narrow and winding rivers. Further miles against the current took the vessel to Frome where everything again had to be disembarked for a portage that required a work-gang to drag the stone some eight or nine miles over land rising persistently to Warminster. There the cargo was replaced in the reassembled craft for another up-river crawl to West Amesbury, and once again unloaded and hauled up the chalk slopes to Stonehenge. This unprecedented undertaking had to be repeated almost 80 times.

What Burl was saying, in quite forthright terms, was that there was not a scrap of evidence to support the theory and that from a logistical point of view it would have been virtually impossible for any “bluestone” voyages to have been completed successfully.  His view is of course underpinned by the shambles known as the Millennium Stone Project, as described in Chapter 3.  The technology required to transport a large group of stones from the Eastern Cleddau to the mouth of Milford Haven, and thence across Carmarthen Bay and up the Bristol Channel, in the face of powerful tidal streams and unstable weather, was just not available to Neolithic tribes.  Besides, the tribes of Middle England were farmers and herders, and not seafarers; and it stretches credibility even further to suggest that they co-operated in their mighty enterprise with friendly coastal tribes who made their vessels and their manpower available -- in exchange for some hypothetical benefits.

It is pointed out -- quite reasonably -- that the sea has never been seen as a barrier but as a highway, presenting opportunities for the movement of goods and for new cultural links and settlement opportunities.  It is also pointed out that  the technology for making substantial cargo boats -- and sailing them across wide stretches of open water -- was available in Bronze Age times and maybe earlier.  However, we are talking here about the EARLY Neolithic, when there was not much trading activity going on in the British Isles, on land let alone at sea.  We know about the trading of a few hand axes and “special treasures” or personal ornaments here and there, and can speculate that animals, crops, skins and furs were exchanged or sold-- but there was no trading of metals or metal ores.

There are also real difficulties in imagining the "mental maps" that Neolithic people might have had of seaways and coastal configurations, and hazards including reefs and shoals.  What was their capacity for planning long-distance routes?   The fact that we know that long voyages were completed in the Neolithic does not necessarily mean that people were actually planning to get from A to B.    They may have hoped to go to C, because some seafarer told them there were wondrous things there,  fifteen days' sailing towards a particular star in the heavens, and ended up at B instead.  There must have been a huge random element in these ancient voyages.  And of course for every successful voyage that we may be able to reconstruct, there would have been hundreds or thousands that failed, with seafarers lost without trace.  Also, if the landlubber Wessex tribes had wanted to carry stones from Wales to Salisbury Plain, they would have needed the active cooperation not only of the coastal tribes who lived on both sides of the Bristol Channel, but also of their “navigators” who knew (and fiercely protected) the secrets of travelling by the stars, the sun and the moon.   In trying to assess the extent of their knowledge, all we have to go on is historical information about the “Stone Age” Pacific traders who came into contact with the early European explorers of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  By the 1700’s these “Stone Age” navigator families had a sophisticated knowledge of how to navigate by the stars,  but by then they had hundreds of generations of accumulated knowledge and observations to build on.  It would be dangerous indeed to assume that Early Neolithic navigators around the western coasts of the British Isles had anything like the same degree of knowledge, since they were moving about in newly explored and newly settled territory.  So while the technical side is one problem (relating to inadequate Early Neolithic vessels), it must also be doubted that our seafarers had the organizational capacity, navigational skills, or territorial / map knowledge assumed by certain imaginative archaeologists.