"I want a quarry!" said the Boss......... and his wish was granted

As indicated in our last post, the geologists working at Stonehenge have got themselves into a frightful tangle over provenancing, and into even more of a tangle by adding their names to all this quarrying hyperbole.  Ixer and Bevins are joint authors of most of the papers in which MPP is the "lead author." They knew what they were getting into, and they share the blame.  Not to put too fine a point upon it, they have been too easily led into territory that they should have avoided like the plague.  A reminder of that the geologists have actually said (as distinct from what others say they have said):

On Carn Goedog, the two geologists are actually quite circumspect, and do not claim to have fixed exact provenances for spotted dolerite monoliths that ended up at Stonehenge. They rather foolishly claim that the Carn Goedog tor is probably a provenance for some spotted dolerite orthostats and fragments, but the tor is very large indeed, covering a surface area of about 60,000 sq m. The sill of which it is a part (sharing physical and geochemical characteristics) extends eastwards towards Carn Alw for about 2 km, and there is a section of it to the west as well, on the other side of a fault line. No perfect matches have been found between samples from Stonehenge and samples from Carn Goedog, and the geologists do not have a sufficient density of field samples to say anything meaningful about the precise provenance of any of the Stonehenge spotted dolerite orthostats. This point has been made over and again by other professional geologists with whom I am in contact. The geologists Ixer and Bevins have NOT identified a quarry; at best, they have made an intelligent guess as to the general area from which some spotted dolerite samples might have come. But they have allowed their names to be attached to articles by MPP and others which purport to describe the Carn Goedog "quarry", and to that degree they are culpable.

On Craig Rhosyfelin, however, culpability is compounded. On several occasions Ixer and Bevins have gone onto the record with the claim that they have "spot provenanced" some of the Stonehenge bluestone debitage to "within a few square metres." (See pages 131 - 143 of my book for a summary) We have gone over the evidence and the arguments over and again on this blog, so I will not repeat things here. Suffice to say that in all of the analyses of the "Jovian fabric" and the foliated rhyolites at Rhosyfelin, no perfect matches have been found, and (whatever else Prof MPP might tell you) the geologists have NOT identified a precise location from which a monolith has been taken. I have spoken to many geologists about this, and they all say the same thing: namely that the density of the Bevins / Ixer sampling points is completely inadequate to draw any conclusions about spot provenancing.  Bevins and Ixer do not have the faintest idea where else their "sampled foliated layer" outcrops across the local landscape. I have repeated this point over and again, but certain archaeologists simply refuse to listen.......

Anyway, as reported in February 2021, Tim Daw has kindly published a map of further sampling conducted over the past couple of years in and around the Brynberian valley and in the valley leading south from Pont Saeson.  Further sampling is shown in the upper valley of the Afon Nyfer and in the Carnedd Neibion Owen - Ty Canol wood area.  Quote from Tim:  "The Whispering Molinia tells me that MPP had a remarkably successful 2020, considering, and many more boxes of rock samples are off to be analysed so that nearly 250 potential bluestone locations that will soon have been checked against the Stonehenge references. They have been snuffling up and down the streams that flow around Craig Rhosyfelin leaving no stone unturned. I look forward to learning the results."

Unfortunately there is no key on this map,  so we don't know what the red, purple and black stars actually indicate.  Are these all NEW sampling points, or does the map show the scores of sites already sampled by Richard Bevins and his colleagues prior to 2011?  Do they show different collection dates, or the identities of the persons who did the sampling, or the rock types involved?  Perhaps somebody will explain.........

Whatever the purpose or nature of the sampling, we look forward to seeing the new sample analyses, which may or may not lead to more accurate provenancing for some of the rhyolite and other fragments in the Stonehenge landscape.  I predict that there might be some reasonable "matching" of material collected in the field with samples in the Stonehenge collections -- but how that is then interpreted is anybody's guess.  Such is the obsession with quarries that I suppose we can expect more "quarrying announcements" any day now, no matter how flimsy the evidence might be.  It's a thankless task, hunting for 30 quarries, but as they say, somebody has to do it........