Stonehenge: complete or incomplete?

Thanks to Phil Morgan for drawing this to my attention.  It's an article by Mike Pitts in the latest edition of "British Archaeology" (Sept-Oct 2013, p 6) in which he draws attention to the find by Tim Daw that during the UK summer drought there were dried-out patches showing up in the Stonehenge turf.  There were lots of them, of all shapes and sizes -- some revealing the locations of old excavation pits, trenches, and paths.  But some of them seemed to coincide with the places where sarsens 17-20 might -- or might not -- have been located.  The illustrations below show the locations of these 'burnt opatches' on the Stonehenge map, and on the ground during July 2013.

Photos:  acknowledgement to British Archaeology.  Please go to the magazine for the full article. In the photo, the patch in the foreground coincides with the supposed location of sarsen 17.

This of course brings up the great debate about the completion (or otherwise) of the stone monument -- a matter argued about since Inigo Jones in 1655 assumed it WAS complete, and Wood in 1747 argued that it wasn't.  I have personally argued that the monument was never completed, since I could not see any sound evidence that it was -- and many others have agreed with me on that, including a number of current archaeologists.  Well, in the light of this latest evidence I don't think I would go so far as Mike Pitts does, with the headline "STONEHENGE DISPUTE SOLVED AFTER 260 YEARS."    But the evidence IS quite persuasive.   So one must keep an open mind.

However........  There are still a number of issues to be sorted before this matter really is resolved.  The "burnt patches" are quite large -- much larger than the "footprints" of the assumed sarsens.  They are also rather irregular, not being in PRECISELY the right places.  Rather large pits might have been dug by the Stonehenge builders in preparation for some big sarsens -- but that does not mean that the sarsens ever were found and installed.  Also, we have the widely-cited evidence from geophysical surveys that shows no pits or sockets here -- how does that evidence square with what has shown up during the 2013 summer drought? (See the chapter by David and Payne in "Science and Stonehenge.")  Again, the marks shown on the photo may simply show where past excavations have taken place, conducted by people who were looking for fallen and buried stones, or simply for the sockets -- and naturally they would have dug and searched in the places where the sockets were assumed to have been located. 

Interesting debate coming up, I suspect....