The other "Carngoedog bluestone monoliths" are glacial erratics too

Carn Goedog -- the "Neolithic bluestone quarrying site" which can only be seen by those wearing rose-tinted spectacles

The other day I put up a post in which I said that it was quite extraordinary that Mike Parker Pearson and his merry gang (all 12 of them) had claimed -- in a peer-reviewed article -- that five of the Stonehenge spotted dolerite bluestones had been quarried from Carn Goedog, apparently without ever bothering to look at the shapes and surface characteristics of the stones themselves.  The word "negligence" doesn't do justice.  "Complete and utter cockup" would be nearer the mark.  Or we might say, if we want to use less colourful language, that the quarrymen have comprehensively falsified their own hypothesis.

This is the post:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/yet-another-quarry-hunters-hypothesis.html

Let's remind ourselves of the words used in the article:

Recent geochemical analysis has revealed two main groups of Stonehenge spotted dolerite, the larger of which (Stones 33, 37, 49, 65 & 67) can be matched most closely with Carn Goedog (Bevins et al. 2013). The second group (Stones 34, 42, 43 & 61) has not been provenanced to a specific Preseli outcrop but may derive from Carn Goedog or from nearby outcrops such as Carn Breseb or Carn Gyfrwy. 

Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham, Chris Casswell, Charles French, Duncan Schlee, Dave Shaw, Ellen Simmons, Adam Stanford, Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer.

Megalith quarries for Stonehenge's bluestones
Antiquity, Volume 93, Issue 367
February 2019 , pp. 45-62

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/megalith-quarries-for-stonehenges-bluestones/AAF715CC586231FFFCC18ACB871C9F5E

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/megalith-quarries-for-stonehenges-bluestones/AAF715CC586231FFFCC18ACB871C9F5E/core-reader 

OK -- at the insistence of the geologist the wording is a little more circumspect than the breathless certainty of the press releases would have us believe -- but there is no doubt at all that the central message being put out by MPP to the media -- and to the world of academic archaeology -- is that 5 of the Stonehenge bluestone monoliths are certainly quarried from Carn Goedog, and that 4 others are in all probability from the same tor.

I showed in the previous post, using images from Simon Banton's website, that only one of the 5 cited stones (number 33) can be referred to as a pillar, but that is so small and so heavily abraded that it cannot possibly be referred to as a freshly quarried monolith.  The others are boulders or slabs with all of the essential characteristics displayed by glacial erratics.

http://www.stonesofstonehenge.org.uk/search/label/Stone%20067

I have now had a look at the other four cited or "assigned" monoliths, and things don't get any better.  Here are the images:

Stone 34 -- a well-rounded, heavily-abraded elongated boulder

Stone 42 -- another boulder with an irregular shape, rounded off edges and a great 

deal of surface damage

Stone 43 -- a well-rounded small boulder with a heavily weathered surface

Stone 61 -- another strange slab with rounded edges and heavy surface weathering.  This one does look as if it might have come from Carn Goedog or one of the other tors  -- not because it looks more like a pillar, but because the curving fracture is characteristic of the dolerite sills exposed to the west of Carn Alw.  But again, it would defy logic to claim that this looks like a freshly quarried orthostat.

So if we look at these nine "bluestone orthostats" which are deemed to "prove" that the Carn Goedog quarry actually existed, the best that can be said is that their geochemical and petrological characteristics may indicate an origin somewhere near Carn Goedog, but that as a group they can only be interpreted as glacial erratics entrained and deposited by the ice of the Irish Sea Glacier.