On the transport of bluestone monoliths, the "evidence" collected by NPP and his team over the last decade has done nothing at all to convince those who sit on the fence. Whatever the archaeologists might say, there remain many fundamental problems with the quarrying / human transport scenario, as summarised here:
★ There is no sound evidence from anywhere in the British Neolithic / Bronze Age record of large stones being hauled over long distances (more than 5 km or so) for incorporation in a megalithic monument. This has been admitted by MPP in his latest TV programme. The builders of Neolithic monuments across the UK simply used whatever large stones were at hand, as multiple researchers have demonstrated.
★ If ancestor or tribute stones were being transported to Stonehenge, why have all of the known bluestones at the site come from the west, and not from any other points of the compass? Were belief systems and "local politics" quite different to the north, east and south?
★ There is no evidence either from West Wales or from anywhere else of bluestones (or spotted dolerite or Rhosyfelin rhyolite in particular) being used preferentially in megalithic monuments, or revered in any way. The builders always used whatever was available to them in the vicinity, and it can be argued that stone availability was a prime locational determinant for stone settings.
★ If long-distance stone haulage was "the great thing" for the builders of Stonehenge, why is there no evidence of the development of the appropriate haulage technology leading up to the late Neolithic, and a decline afterwards? It is a complete technological aberration, as noted by MPP.
★ The evidence for Neolithic quarrying activity in key locations is questionable. No physical evidence has ever been found of ropes, picks, levers, wedges, rollers, trackways, sledges, abandoned stones, quarrymen's camps, working floors or anything else that might bolster the hypothesis. The so-called “engineering features” are entirely natural, as demonstrated by John Downes, Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and myself.
★ The sheer variety of bluestone types (near 30 when one includes packing stones and debris) argues against selection and human transport. There cannot possibly have been multiple "bluestone quarries" scattered across West Wales, even if MPP insists on searching for them......
★ Bits and pieces of experimental archaeology on stone haulage techniques (normally in "ideal" conditions and using modern materials) have done nothing to show that our ancestors could cope with the sheer physical difficulty of stone haulage across the heavily-wooded Neolithic terrain of West Wales (characterised by bogs, cataracts, steep slopes and very few clearings) or around the rocky and stormy coast.
★ Neither has it been shown that the Stonehenge builders had the geographical awareness and navigational ability to undertake long and highly complex journeys with very heavy loads. Activity on Neolithic trading routes was always concentrated on high value, low-weight articles.
★ And if there was a "proto-Stonehenge" somewhere, built of assorted local stones and then dismantled and taken off to Stonehenge, where was it? The mooted "Preselite" axe factory has never been found, and neither has the mythical Stonehenge precursor, in spite of the wildly enthusiastic PR campaign relating to the imagined "lost circle" at Waun Mawn.
★ Analyses of bluestone monolith stone shapes does not suggest that elongated “pillars” were preferred. Slabs, stumps and boulders of all shapes and sizes are highly suggestive of a glacial erratic assemblage. Only a few pillar-shaped monoliths in the bluestone horseshoe have been clearly shaped.
★ There is no reason why Neolithic people should have gone to the trouble of actually "quarrying" large monoliths from difficult locations such as Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin when there were thousands of suitable rocks, of many different types, littering the landscape round about -- just waiting to be picked up. The idea that "quarrying sites" were sacred or powerful is a modern fantasy.
(This is an update from a post I published about five years ago. Since that time, the attempts to find hard evidence have failed, and have been replaced by intense myth-making activity, with suppositions dressed up as evidence. Scientific malpractice? That much is self-evident.)
I believe a similar debate has taken place about the kerbstones of Newgrange, Ireland. The consensus seems to be that they were transported, largely upriver by boat, from about 20 km away. I'm not sure how big they are - one source says up to 4 metres long. Not that that is necessarily relevant to Stonehenge.
ReplyDeleteNot sure about that. Quote: "It is not known with any certainty how the larger stones which form the kerb and passage and chamber of Newgrange were brought to the site. Many of these stone slabs, 550 in number, were collected from where they had been lying in the landscape. Because many of the stones were found to be weathered, it is believed they were not quarried, so there would have been a huge logistical task in finding suitable boulders dotted throughout the landscape."
ReplyDelete"Most of the kerb stones are made of grit (grey-wacke) or slate, and according to the archaeologists they were collected rather than quarried."
I'm not sure, but this seems to be reliable information. I'm intrigued that the Newgrange story seems to be one of "stone or monolith gathering" -- not quarrying and long-distance transport -- in contrast to Stonehenge, where this weird quarrying and long-distance transport hypothesis has been done to death for the best part of a century........
https://mythicalireland.com/ancient-sites/101-facts-about-newgrange/
The "gathered" large stones used in the passage and as kerbstones at Newgrange are assumed to have been picked up from the litter of glacial erratics scattered across the landscape -- the evidence is that they are heavily abraded and weathered -- just like the bluestones in the bluestone circle at Stonehenge. Strange that MPP and the other archaeologists working at Stonehenge absolutely refuse to acknowledge that these are characteristics of most of the bluestones. Do the Stonehenge bluestones look like quarried stones? The answer is a simple "NO"......... and that will be proved when cosmogenic dating is done on them.
ReplyDeleteAnother Newgrange reference:
ReplyDeletehttp://thelanguageofstone.blogspot.com/2015/05/co-meath-newgrange.html
We could describe some stones at both Newgrange and Stonehenge as rogue, i.e. as in the dictionary definition example: an elephant that is living apart from the herd. To my mind, that definition also fits MPP and his entrusted team, who these days may be broadly described as "living apart" from mainstream archaeologists when it comes to their stubborn collective adherence to MPP's blinkered, gormless, God bless him, insistence that the Earth is flat and Glaciers are the elephants in his room at Stonehenge. He sticks to Human Transport, a hypothesis which to me is essentially too far - fetched. Those of us who prefer the Glaciation Hypothesis are willing to accept that human transport still could have had a part to play: maybe up to 10 to 20 miles. The Nay - Sayers, in contrast, especially MPP and his sworn - to - silence Team, have chosen to present a polarised view and to scientifically ignore the credible possibility of bluestone glacial movement being A factor.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. The human transport hypothesis is given in e.g. http://www.carrowkeel.com/sites/boyne/newkerbstones.html. I don't know anything about the glacial history of this area - I suppose a glacier may have come from the direction of Scotland or the Lake District via the Greywacke rocks around Clogherhead.
ReplyDeleteThanks Philip -- yes, looked at that one. A very nice web site! There are a lot of illogicalities in the interpretations of the features in the Boyne Valley. Romantic ideas about boulder-carrying boats abound! We have done various earlier posts on this topic......
ReplyDeleteIce movements (and hence erratic transport routes) were very complex in this area -- sometimes, local Irish Ice was dominant, flowing broadly NW >> SE, but in phases when the Irish Sea Glacier was dominant, ice flow was broadly NE >> SW. So erratics could have been moved across the Newgrange site from the NW, N or NE. The extraordinary mixture of rock types supports that.
OK - Anon: "Glacial and fluvioglacial deposits in the Boyne Valley, Ireland", mentions erratics of basalt, granite, triassic sandstone - “All of the erratics suggest a former ice movement from NW to SE”. However, it also says, "The Boyne Valley was influenced by ice from two sources: the north central midlands and the Irish Sea Basin ... Erratics from the Irish Sea Basin have been found as far inland as Slane”, which is west of Newgrange. So glacial transport of greywacke from the Clogherhead area is not impossible.
ReplyDeleteThis is a simple study (now somewhat out of date) of the glaciation of the Boyne area:
ReplyDeletehttps://nanopdf.com/download/for-the-microsoft-word-version-of-this-case-study-5ad1684b600bf_pdf
More info on ice movements has come from the BRITICE-CHRONO work.
Oddly, MPP et al say, “the large kerb stones … of greywacke come from Clogher Head, some 5 km away on the coast ..” (“Long-distance landscapes …”, Megaliths & Geology 2015). Clogher Head is actually 20 km away from Newgrange.
ReplyDeleteHOW's gang left Rhosyfelin in a right bad state after all their shenanigans. The fact that it is now classified as a significant geological site in Wales says it all, really. MPP has displayed a colonial attitude to little Preseli from his location at UCL.
ReplyDeleteIt's an extension of the mindset. Stonehenge (or metropolitan England) is the centre of everything, and everything else is peripheral and colonial....... by definition backward and under-developed until the leadership and guidance of the centre is acknowledged or embraced. This is exactly the point made by Barclay and Brophy in that rather important article a couple of years ago.
ReplyDelete