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Tuesday 12 October 2021

The bluestone arrival myth



When did the bluestones arrive?  Or were they there all the time, unused at first, and then 
used, over and again........??

Over and again, in books and articles, and in exhibits galore, we are told that there was a "bluestone arrival date" at Stonehenge.  That date varies a bit from one source to another, but the essence is that before 4,600 yrs BP the stones were not there, and then the bluestones were fetched from Wales specifically for use in the monument.  Suddenly (or maybe over a few decades) they were there, available to be incorporated into one bluestone setting after another.  The most common view is that the first setting of the bluestones was in the Q and R holes, in Stage 2 of the monument's history -- but Parker Pearson (2012) subscribes to the view that the bluestones arrived on site earlier, around 5,000 yrs BP, and were first used in the Aubrey Holes. he thinks this partly because og the frequency of bluestone fragments in the holes, and partly because of the presence of "compacted sediments" deemed to have carried the weight of standing stones.

These statements are typical:

Source: 
https://evanevanstours.com/blog/how-was-stonehenge-built/
The Bluestones Arrive (2,600 – 2,500 B.C.)
With the exception of evidence of human burials, Stonehenge remained largely untouched from its initial stages of construction for around 500 years. Then suddenly, around 2,500 B.C., the smaller ‘bluestones’ started to arrive.  Around 82 bluestones arrived from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, Wales – around 140 miles (225km) away.

Source:
When the newly discovered circle’s stones were removed by Neolithic tribes, they may, according to the team, have been dragged to Stonehenge, to be incorporated within its major rebuilding around 2500 BC.

Source:
.......it was the arrival of the bluestones that made Stonehenge special, so that understanding the meaning and purpose of these stones meant looking not only at Stonehenge but also the source area in the Preseli Hills.

Source:
The Aubrey Holes are a circle of Late Neolithic pits inside the circuit of Stonehenge's outer bank, associated with its stage 1 construction (Darvill et al. 2012a; Parker Pearson 2012: 181–86). Our recent reassessment of these 56 pits interprets them as being sockets for the bluestones on their arrival at Stonehenge (Parker Pearson et al. 2009: 32; Darvill et al. 2012a: 1029)

Castleden, 1993, p 95, says unequivocally that the bluestones arrived at Stonehenge in 2150 BC, and explores a number of romantic and fantastical notions as to how and why they were brought there.  Chippindale, 1983, p 267, refers to the "first appearance on the site" in Stonehenge Phase II, c 2150-2000 BC.  Johnson, 2008, p 164, refers to the arrival of "the original batch of bluestones from Wales."  Pareker4 Parker Pearson has written many times about the arrival of the bluestones, while revising the actual dates on which this great event is supposed to have occurred.

And so it goes on.  The human transport hypothesis is so pervasive that it is simply assumed to be true.  It seems to have occurred to nobody that the "bluestone arrival date" has nothing to do with an arrival (or series of arrivals or deliveries) at all.  It is simply the date at which bluestones started to be used (or modified for use)  in stone settings.  The boulders, slabs and pillars could simply have been lying around in the Stonehenge landscape for many thousands of years as glacial erratics before people started to pick them up and arrange them in clusters and patterns, in the process transforming an old earthwork monument into a new stone structure.

So what about the hard evidence on the ground, at Stonehenge?  The most accessible and detailed source is the weighty 1995 tome called "Stonehenge in its Landscape" edited by Ros Cleal and others.  It contains scores of diagrams, cross sections from excavations, tables and lists of finds -- all adding up to a detailed (and often confusing) portrait of the visible Stonehenge and that part of it which is buried beneath the ground surface.  The "arrival date" for the bluestones is mentioned frequently, and indeed even when it is not being mentioned it powerfully influences the interpretations of buried features and sediments.  Where bluestone fragments are observed in exposed sections the lowest bluestone is used as a "dating proxy" over and again.  Below the lowest bluestone fragments, it is assumed that the sediments pre-date the "bluestone arrival date",  and above them it is assumed that the sediments must be younger.  Radiocarbon and pollen evidence is handy to have, but where there are no organic remains the lowest bluestone fragments do the dating job very nicely............

Cart before horse?  Yes, I think so, in some cases at least.  There are many analysed sections in which things do not quite work out as they are supposed to -- so we have the introduction of the idea of bluestone fragments being in "secondary" and even "tertiary" positions.  In a previous post I remarked upon the presence of a rhyolite fragment in a Mesolithic context at Stonehenge -- in the discussion of which Mike Allen got into a bit of a tangle.





When your interpretations are driven by powerful assumptions, even your "accurate recording" of exposures can be influenced.  In your diagrams, where you encounter complex and subtle stratigraphy, it is tempting to locate your "bluestone-rich layers" and to draw a line beneath them.  This line then becomes the dividing line between a "pre-bluestone" layer below and a "post-bluestone layer" above, always interpreted as a secondary or tertiary fill of some sort.  So the graphic representation is falsified or corrupted, not because of scientific malpractice but because of unconscious bias.  I think this has happened time and again, and can be seen in many of the diagrams in the pages of the Cleal et al volume.

Now and then things get even more seriously convoluted, especially with respect to bluestone fragments found in contexts that pre-date the stone settings phases.  Cleal et al refer to this as Phase 1 or "the first monument".  Over and again in the records for the excavations of the ditch and its fills, there are records of bluestone fragments.  See for example pp 83, 85, and 132.  There are bluestone chips in many of the investigated Aubrey Holes.   Atkinson and Evans were confused by the presence of bluestone fragments in places where "they should not have been" --  see for example around pp139 and 140 of the text, in which John Evans does a series of intellectual somersaults in trying to explain why certain bluestone fragments are found in places where they are not supposed to be.  There is more discussion about the problematic occurrence of bluestones in the North Barrow bank and the South Barrow ditch, deemed as dated to Phase 3b by Cleal et al -- ie in one of the stone monument phases.  On the other hand David Field and others think that the North Barrow is OLDER than the Stonehenge embankment and the stone monument -- making it almost impossible to explain the presence of bluestone fragments there, if one adheres to the establishment view of "the arrival of the bluestones."

On and around p 376 of the large tome by Cleal et al, it is explained that the collection and recording of bluestone fragments by Hawley and most of the other excavators has been haphazard and even slapdash at times -- and it is also clear that we cannot make definitive judgments about either the presence or absence of bluestones, or their frequency or stratigraphy,  in the greater Stonehenge monument, when only about 50% of the surface area has been investigated.  On p 398 it is stated that the distribution of bluestone pieces, as far as it is known, does not demonstrate concentrations close to the bluestones themselves.  This might be a significant point.  Further, the distribution of bluestone fragments in the wider Stonehenge landscape suggests that many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge.

So this is my suggestion.  Nothing in the Stonehenge stratigraphy, or in the history of excavations, negates the idea that the bluestones and abundant sarsens were in the Stonehenge landscape long before Stonehenge was ever dreamed of.  When the earthwork phase of the monument was started, the stones that littered the landscape were simply ignored; but suddenly the local tribes began to use stone here, as they did everywhere else.  With that cultural shift, Stonehenge became a very special place, simply because of the abundance of available stone -- and then there was no stopping the builders, who became very ambitious.  First, they used the smaller boulders and slabs (both bluestones and sarsens)  in their settings; and then they started to differentiate between the sarsens on the one hand and everything else on the other. They also started to shape the stones they wanted to use, fabricating pillars and lintels in the process.  The first appearance of "bluestone fragments" in the Stonehenge sediments does not date the ARRIVAL of the stones, but does date the ONSET OF STONE WORKING.

And I still think that Stonehenge was never finished.  The presence of multiple sockets in the centre of the monument speaks to me of experimentation, changing design concepts and -- above all else -- of lack of stones. Certainly there was ambition.  The builders initially used whatever was immediately to hand -- but then they had to range further and further afield, until they eventually ran out of stones or decided that the effort of getting them was not worthwhile.

All perfectly simple.  If there is anybody out there who thinks I am wrong, they will no doubt be in touch......

See also:












































19 comments:

Tony Hinchliffe said...

I prefer to go for the ecological version, that all dem bluestones was fetched from Welsh whales, they found their homes in them fish's abdomens, though even that ain't necessarily so, no sir.

Tony Hinchliffe said...

I see Jose Morinho, the self - styled "Special One", is much less special these days, having been reduced to advertising football gambling. Similarly, English Heritage and the likes of MPP are still staking all on the bluestone "arrival" myth.

Better by far to adopt the same view most of the World is taking to Climate Change: that Mother Nature is very powerful, and we neglect her at our peril, whether we are considering Global Warming or Historic Glaciation Events.

Tom Flowers said...

The lack of sarsens idea does not hold water. Avebury had hundreds. Stonehenge, with twin axes 14.7 inches apart (18 megalithic inches) proved too complex to build, so people gave it up unfinished. The idea for Stonehenge, where sarsens were deemed to reflect sunlight like mirrors, came from Avebury, anyway.

BRIAN JOHN said...

My own feeling is that there were some bluestones and some sarsens in the area around Stonehenge--- enough to start the job of building this strange and enigmatic monument, but never enough to finish it.....

Tony Hinchliffe said...

The heel stone seems to have been ALREADY there (Mike Pitts), provided by Nature and positioned by Nature.......wonder what those Mesolithic fir posts were stationed for, pre - the earthen bank? The sarsens AS WELL AS the erratic train of bluestones may have been fairly prolific in that general area, some of them may have been transported a short distance within the Anglian glaciation c. 450,000 years ago from Chitterne/ Heytesbury parishes.

PeteG said...

I have walked all the sarsen stone drifts in Wiltshire and Dorset and have never found a single suitable sized stone that would be usefull as an upright at Stonehenge. I know some of the sarsens are partly buried but I agree that they simply ran of suitible stones.
PeteG

BRIAN JOHN said...

Thanks Pete -- yes, I have always been rather intrigued by the fact that some of the big sarsens at Stonehenge are absolutely splendid, but you then have a range of stone shapes ending up with some that are "rubbish" - and those must have been difficult to move and erect without doing great damage to them. I don't know much about the sarsens, but sarsens 25, 27,5,7, 10, 19 etc come to mind. That too suggests that they ran out of suitable stones before the monument was finished.......

BRIAN JOHN said...

Tony -- yes, with many different rock types and around 30 different provenances, overwhelmingly from the west, we have to be talking glacial transport. If MPP talks about "ancestral tribute stones", why are there none from the north, east and south? It's not as if those compass directions were short of stones........... so were the western tribes from north Preseli peculiarly subservient, or peculiarly liable to wander around carting their stones with them? As Shakespeare might have said (but didn't) --
'Oh what a tangled web we weave/
When first we practice to deceive'.............

Tony Hinchliffe said...

David Field & his co - author David McOmish have commented upon the apparent difference in appearance of certain Stonehenge sarsens.......more anon,.............. the Great Outdoors calls...

Tony Hinchliffe said...

.....(continued).. ".while exceptionally large sarsen boulders are rare in the [distant] North Wessex Downs and most pieces there measure just a few metres across, Stonehenge-sized
sarsens have unexpectedly been found in swallow-holes in Oxfordshire and possibly at East Kennet, where they have escaped weathering and the attentions of agricultural improvement, and it is quite possible that stones could have been extracted from similar holes around Stonehenge. " Field and McOmish, " Neolithic Horizons.... ",2016, page 99.

More to follow....

Tony Hinchliffe said...

... "A number of potential swallow-holes survive on the downs close to the stone settings-one such massive feature exists just to the SW, and other depressions that may have contained stones occur on the slopes to the NE. The Rev. E. Duke in 1846 and subsequently E.H. Stone, who inspected the tooling on the stones in the 1920s, both considered that the sarsen in Stonehenge's NE arc may have come from a local buried seam, since all were relatively flat and of tabular form.

Flinders Petrie also speculated that the stones originated in the immediate vicinity and, indeed, that the reason for the location of the site rested on the presence of a cluster of large sarsens.

William Gowland, who excavated at Stonehenge in the early 20th century, and the geologists Professor J.W. Judd [the subject of Brian's NEXT Post] AND H.H. Thomas all came to similar conclusions. Hugo Anderson-Wymark perceptively observed that some of the trilithons have an orange hue, others grey, and so appear to derive from at least two sources...."

Dave Maynard said...

Many years ago, for my sins I worked as a labourer for a builder in Purbeck. While on one job, I noticed that there were many lorries from Somerset and asked why they came so far.

The builder said that there was no available sand in Somerset, so they started the day with a load of rock from Somerset, down to South Dorset and then worked out of the quarries there during the day before going back home with a load of sand.

Was the builder making this up? Or is it a reflection of how natural forces have distributed materials around the country?

Dave

BRIAN JOHN said...

Never heard that before, Dave. The geological maps show plenty of deposits in Somerset that include sand and gravel -- but maybe the quantities are insufficient for the opening up of large extractive quarries, given the scale of capital investment needed?

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Did you used to work on archaeological sites in Wiltshire, Dave? I think I saw a mention of you in a WANHS Magazine item about a dig close to the Wylye valley about remnants of a round barrow near the A36.

Dave Maynard said...

Dorset in the 1980's was more my stamping ground. The only places I've worked in Wiltshire are Coneybury henge, just south of SH and something on the Warminster bypass, which is the A36 and had some barrow type components with a lot of other things.
There was another Dave Maynard, now deceased, which confuses the records occasionally.

Dave Maynard said...

There's certainly plenty of sand and gravel in East Dorset and South Hants. Whether it is commercially available is another matter. I don't know Somerset at all, it is just a big long place to travel through to get to Dorset.

These lorries may have had plenty of work in Dorset to justify coming out of their homelands and being able to take a load of sand back at the end of the day to an area with a relative shortage paid for the extra diesel and time as a small bonus.

Dave

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Hi Dave, sounds like I was reading about you then. Coneybury henge must Have been amazing. Have you worked for Wessex Archaeology? So these days you're based in W Wales are you?

Dave Maynard said...

I was a student at Weymouth in the mid 70's on the Practical Archaeology course. I worked with some of the characters who became Wessex Archaeology. Coneybury Henge was probably at the point of gestation of Wessex, although we were not aware of it then. Later, I worked on other Wessex projects, like Warminster and parts of Dorset, although always on a temporary basis. My roots are in west Wales, and back here now despite international diversions.

It is all amazing, even if we do not appreciate it at the time, being focussed on other things at that point. It sounds as if Brian is having having the same thoughts about his early ice studies.

Funnily enough, I remember some of those who have been quoted on this blog in a drunken evening in the big tent at the Coneybury camp site. It all comes together over time.

Dave

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Dave, been a lot more travelled in the last 4 to 5 weeks than for ages. All the trips have gravitated towards Stonehenge. Mind you, I also have quite strong Welsh connections as well.I've lived in south - east Wales for 8 years and spent time in, and travelled to Aberystwyth. Also my brother for 25 years has lived in north Pembrokeshire. He's very keen on the landscape and nature.

So recently I've been taking in the landscape above the Wylye valley south of Warminster not so far from the potentially very significant Boles barrow with its bluestone links.

As I started off studying Geography (although that might very easily have been Archaeology) I now look back over the years and am immensely grateful that, through providence, I've managed to link up again after many decades with my Geomorphology lecturer, Dr Brian John, via his books and this Blog!!



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