In 1901, one hundred and twenty years ago, Judd suggested that the bluestones at Stonehenge were erratics of glacial origin. He argued that the assemblage of debris at Stonehenge had come from North Pembrokeshire or North Wales. He also observed that in areas affected by very ancient glaciations, most of the till had been eroded away by natural processes after hundreds of thousands of years, leaving only a thin scatter of erratics here and there. Further, he observed that hard stones (including bluestones) left behind on Salisbury Plain would have been targetted down through the centuries for building purposes simply because neither chalk nor flint makes good building material. This was a point also made quite forcefully by Thorpe et al (1991) following a large bluestone research project under the auspices of the Open University. Intriguingly, Judd concentrated not on the 43 known bluestone monoliths or orthostats themselves, but on the debitage or debris in the Stonehenge soil layer. He found an extraordinary assortment of soft or fragile stones including fissile sandstones, micaceous sandstones, greywackes (argillaceous and easily broken down), flagstones, slates and "clay-slates", and fine-grained glauconitic sandstones. He made the point specifically that this material did not seem to be very closely related to the remaining standing bluestones -- so he concluded that only the hardest stones had survived to the present day, with all the other material breaking down and becoming incorporated into the soil layer over many thousands of years. Judd suggested the presence of a “Stonehenge moraine” incorporating an abundance of foreign stones which would have been readily available to the builders of Stonehenge. He also argued that “stone availability” (of both bluestones and the larger sarsens) might have actually determined the precise position of the monument -- an idea which has subsequently been largely forgotten.
A very smart old fellow........... and here are some of the extracts (pp 58-61) from the work that he did for Prof William Gowland, prior to the publication of the famous 1903 article in Archaeologia in 1901 and in The Wiltshire Magazine in 1903. Click to enlarge.
There are some very knowledgeable interpretations in there, and some simple yet profound points, urging a sensible scientific approach (rather than one involving fantasies and myths) to the problems of bluestone origins and transport. I particularly like the stress placed by Judd on this point: if the builders of Stonehenge wanted to fetch big bluestone monoliths from West Wales and struggle mightily to get them to Stonehenge, why would they have carried the shaped bluestones (mostly those in the bluestone horseshoe) in their rough state and then whittled them down and shaped them on site at Stonehenge, rather than at their places of origin? Old Judd knew all about Occam's Razor.
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