Katy Whitaker:
WHAT IF NONE OF THE BUILDING STONES AT STONEHENGE CAME FROM WILTSHIRE?
OXFORD JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 2019
Many thanks to Katy Whitaker for sending me, on request, her paper recently published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. She knows I'm going to criticise it rather energetically -- so all credit to her!
Anyway, as I expected, it's a rather strange piece of work, and it's difficult to know whether it is
serious in its intent, and whether Katy actually believes what is now in print. It was intended to challenge accepted theory, and in her Acknowledgements she describes how the gauntlet was thrown down:
In 2016, the conveners of the third Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Research Students’ Symposium threw down a gauntlet. The provocation, ‘Anarchy in the UK?’, challenged speakers to construct alternative pasts diverging from, disrupting, or inverting, linear narratives of social evolution in the period c.4000 cal BC–c.1500 cal BC. This paper resulted from that challenge. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH\L503939\1) through the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
All that having been said, this is now a paper in a learned journal, and it should have been subject to proper review. Frankly, I'm amazed that it has found its way into print, and that the Editor and referees have not insisted on much tighter writing and much more careful consideration of a wide range of points. Throughout the text there are unsupported assertions and an apparent lack of appreciation of what exists in the literature. Perhaps I should not be too surprised -- I have complained before that for some journals the practice of peer review seems to have been abandoned.
I'll refer to the paper in more detail in another post, but on an initial reading I'm struck by the following:
1. In following up her argument that the Stonehenge stones -- of all sorts -- were "chosen" or "selected" because of their special properties (colour, size, shape, texture) or because they were from special localities, Katy seems to lump all bluestones together as "igneous", and does not adequately consider the wide variety of rock types (including soft and flaky "rubbish stones") that come under the "bluestone" label.
2. She does not consider why the "special" bluestones brought to Stonehenge are not supplemented by other "special" stones from all other compass directions -- for example Old Red Sandstone megaliths from the Brecon Beacons or igneous monoliths from the Welsh Borders, or granite monoliths from Cornwall, or sandstone blocks from the east.
3. She completely ignores (I think we can probably say "wilfully ignores") the work of Kellaway, Williams-Thorpe, and others of us who have argued that the glacial transport of monoliths and smaller rock fragments eastwards from Pembrokeshire by the Irish Glacier is not just possible but probable. There is not a single citation of any work that happens to be "inconvenient" to the central hypothesis; that is extraordinary, and I am amazed that the Editor and the referees of this paper allowed the author to get away with it. Quote: Possible glacial explanations for the presence of bluestone in Wiltshire have been firmly contradicted on a number of grounds (Darrah 1993; Green 1973, 1997; Pitts 2000; Bevins et al. 2016). This is the full extent of the discussion of the possible role of glacier ice......
4. The author ignores, as far as I can see, the increasingly commonplace view (expressed by David Field and others) that the collection of stones of all types was a rather utilitarian matter with no great mystical or spiritual component attached. In other words, the builders of Stonehenge used whatever stones they could gather, from close at hand wherever possible.
5. The author does not mention the other view, which is gaining currency, that the builders of Stonehenge ran out of stones (or energy, or motivation) and that the monument was never finished.
6. In arguing that the re-use of some stones at Stonehenge indicates that such stones were specially revered (having come from older sacred monuments) the author fails to consider the much stronger likelihood that stones were re-used simply because there was a stone shortage.
7. Interestingly, Katy gives quite detailed consideration to the packing stones, mauls and hammer stones found at Stonehenge, and suggests that these too were carefully selected because they held "significance". There is some very useful material here, to which I shall return. But again she fails to consider what natural processes might have led to the introduction of these materials into the neighbourhood.
8. The author accepts without question that the "identification" of a bluestone quarry at Rhosyfelin by MPP et al is correct -- without any recognition that the quarrying hypothesis is hotly disputed in the peer-reviewed literature.
The final sentence of the paper summarises the central hypothesis:
If none of Stonehenge’s building stones came from Wiltshire, but were contributed over time in a series of collaborative undertakings by varied groups of people from far and wide, then the monument might typify social differentiation as the outcome of, rather than the precursor to, prehistoric monument building.
This is of course extremely fanciful -- and maybe a little tongue-in-cheek -- but the paper gives us an insight into the fantasy world inhabited by many modern academic archaeologists who apparently have no appreciation whatsoever of natural processes, and who apparently have no wish to find out more. There seem to be rather a lot of people out there who have no particular wish to disturb, let alone abandon, what the infamous Dr Kurding called "the ignorance of a lifetime".
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