The absurdity of the quarrying hypothesis (2)

"Miles from anywhere, lost in the jungle, and down in a deep valley.  With a horrible rock type too.  Ah yes, the perfect place for a bit of reverential quarrying.......let's do it!!"

In their rather weird podcast about Waun Mawn and all things related, the Prehistory Guys (Messrs Soskin and Bott) got most things wrong, but they did get one thing right -- namely the complete absurdity of the bluestone quarrying hypothesis.  

As they pointed out, to attach importance to the Rhosyfelin "quarry" as a source of Stonehenge bluestones is pretty preposterous, since there are no monoliths at Stonehenge made of the foliated rhyolite that has been identified as typical of the Rhosyfelin outcrop.  There are chips and fragments of the "right" rock type in the debitage, but that is all.  To make matters even worse, if Carn Goedog really was a Neolithic bluestone quarry producing spotted dolerite monoliths, and if the stones taken from it were really "parked up" for 500 years at Waun Mawn,  why are there no traces of the right spotted dolerites in the "lost circle"?  MPP and his colleagues speculate (on the basis of one fragment, one standing stone and three recumbent stones) that the standing stones that were at Waun Mawn were unspotted dolerite.  And if the supposed stone circle at Waun Mawn was desirable enough to be dismantled and shipped off to Stonehenge, why did the locals only take some stones away and leave others behind?

The Prehistory Guys might well have added, if they had been better informed, that the great bulk of the bluestone monoliths at Stonehenge have clearly not been quarried at all -- they are rounded, faceted and heavily weathered boulders and slabs, with just a few of them elongated enough to be called pillars.  They have been out in the open for hundreds of thousands thousands of years, as cosmogenic dating will eventually reveal.  Only the pillars in the bluestone horseshoe could be deemed to be the "products of human intervention", since they are clearly shaped from larger blocks of stone, some of them in quite a sophisticated fashion.

They might also have added that the sheer number of different rock types included in the "bluestone assemblage" indicates that there was no preferential collection of especially desirable rock types.  This was pointed out long ago by Olwen Williams-Thorpe and others. There are around 30 different rock types at Stonehenge; there cannot possibly have been 30 West Wales quarries.  In any case, if we look at the megalithic monuments in West Wales (cromlechs, standing stone settings, circles, gallery graves etc) it is demonstrable that the builders simply used whatever rocks were immediately at hand.  They did not travel great distances to collect up "desirable stones" from quarries.

And why would they be stupid enough to quarry for rock in difficult locations when the landscape was -- and still is -- littered with boulders, slabs and pillars of all sizes and of many different lithologies?

"Ah yes," say the archaeologists.  "This is all to oversimplify and to misunderstand the Neolithic mind.  This is all about reverence and ritual.  The really important thing about the stone collection enterprise was the act of winning the stone and overcoming great physical difficulties -- and even suffering for the cause -- in wild and magical places while working together as a community and showing great reverence towards the ancestors."  Brings to mind the head-banging monks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.......

And so the archaeologists continue to dig, encouraged by their cameraderie and sense of common purpose and by the belief that common sense is of no significance whatsoever in the matter of the Stonehenge bluestones.