Salisbury Plain -- no traces of ice action? Think again......

It's a standard tactic used by archaeologists, when one talks of the glacial transport of monoliths from West Wales to Salisbury Plain, to say "There are no traces of glaciation anywhere in Wiltshire.  Therefore, even if glaciation was possible, it did not happen."  That is a bit disingenuous, given that there are abundant "inconvenient stones" whose presence is only explicable, in my view, by reference to the work of ice.  For a start there are the Stonehenge bluestones themselves -- in the bluestone circle, as fine a collection of weathered and abraded glacial erratics as you are likely to find anywhere in the world.  (Admittedly those in the bluestone horseshoe are shaped into pillars, but one does not have a problem with that.)  Then we have the thousands of fragments of stones of many types in the Stonehenge debitage, some of which have been examined by the geologists and found to have come from many exotic locations.  Since only about 50% of the surface area of the stone monument has been excavated, logic dictates that there must be many thousands more exotic fragments, as yet undiscovered.

Then there are all the stones further afield.  This is an extract from my book "The Stonehenge Bluestones",  written in 2018.  Some bits of the text have been overtaken by events, but even if some of the "finds" recorded are not now thought to be bluestone fragments and cobbles, there have been other finds to expand the list -- many of these already dealt with on this blog.

It is true that there are no confirmed morainic mounds or exotic monoliths littering the ground surface, but the argument that Stonehenge was built (or partly built) with stones of all sizes that were littered across the landscape is perfectly valid.  So what is there still to be discovered within the Salisbury Plain sediments?  To say that there are no foreign stones on the chalklands, when probably less than 1% of the surface has ever been investigated, is patently absurd..........

And if the "human importation" hypothesis is your thing, did the local Neolithic tribes import "rubbish stone" from here and there (and always in the west) just to scatter it about at random?

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Salisbury Plain and the Inconvenient stones

Ever since the days of Judd, Hawley and the geologists brought in to advise on stone types and provenance, it has been known that Salisbury Plain is littered with foreign stones and fragments. In 2009 Tim Darvill said: “Beyond the Stonehenge Landscape there are pieces of bluestone scattered across central southern England......”   Because most of the digging into the soil horizons has been done in the course of archaeological investigations, most of the discoveries have been assumed to be linked in some way with human activity. This again might involve circular reasoning, since small stones and boulders might have been in place in a locality prior to the ground disturbance associated with the building of Neolithic barrows or ritual features, and might simply have been moved about prior to incorporation in these man-made structures. They might even have been a nuisance. There is often a tendency to assume that all finds (for example, of bluestone fragments) are significant -- but they may equally well be insignificant in the sense that they are not actually associated with stone working of any sort. There is a need to differentiate between worked fragments and natural or locally-occurring fragments -- and this is not always done.

That having been said, we can learn a lot from the occurrence of foreign stones found in long barrow and other excavations. We have already seen how the presence of a spotted dolerite boulder in Boles Barrow caused confusion in archaeological ranks, on the basis that in terms of chronology and “human motivation”, it was not supposed to be there. The Jurassic Limestone blocks in Berwick St James are also “inconvenient” in the same sense. Richard Thorpe and his colleagues assembled information in 1991 relating to other intriguing stone finds: for example, a piece of rhyolite found near Avebury, a spotted dolerite stone from near Lake, a piece of rhyolite from a very early Neolithic pit fill on King Barrow Ridge (associated with pre-grooved pottery fragments and probably more than 4500 years old), and fragments of quartz diorite, hornblende diorite and granidiorite in the long barrow numbered Amesbury 39. There are also assemblages of foreign stones at Windmill Hill. Maskelyne and Judd were also quite certain of the presence of sedimentary rock fragments including greywackes, flagstones and shales, and metamorphic rocks including slates -- all discovered in the spoil from archaeological digs. Dolerites (spotted and unspotted), rhyolites and sandstones “of the Altar Stone type” were also recorded by Cunnington, Colt Hoare and other early workers, and by archaeologists including Julian Richards in more recent times. At least twenty “bluestones” have been listed by the Wessex Archaeological Trust in the Stonehenge environs but outside the monument itself. There are thousands of bluestone fragments in the old collections and in the sediments within the Aubrey Holes.

The recent excavations at Durrington Walls, Windmill Hill and the Cursus have been particularly revealing, throwing up bits of bluestone with alarming frequency. Many of these occurrences have been listed on Stonehenge blog sites and on other segments of Stonehenge cyberspace -- and while some fragments have undoubtedly been misidentified and while others may truly be “adventitious”, many of them have come from meaningful archaeological contexts. For example, bluestone fragments from the Cursus are now being found and identified. Rob Ixer has identified some of JF Stone’s 1947 finds from the Cursus and Fargo Wood as “acid volcanics and tuffs” and also spotted dolerite. Some seemed to be calcareous ashes. In 2008 a further “bluestone” from the fill of the Cursus pit was identified as identical to one of the sandstone stumps in the Stonehenge bluestone circle. That is potentially very significant, since it means the lump of (Ordovician?) sandstone was present before 5,200 BP in this very early earthwork. Just like the Boles Barrow spotted dolerite boulder, that is very inconvenient indeed if you happen to subscribe to the human transport theory, but not at all inconvenient if you happen to think that the bluestones on Salisbury Plain are glacial erratics……….

And in addition to these recorded finds there are the rumours. One rumour was that Richard Atkinson found a lump of bluestone on Silbury Hill when he was working there. The find is unrecorded in the published literature, and attempts to verify it through English Heritage in 2008 got nowhere. But suddenly it has appeared in the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury, with a note that it was found in 1970. It would be natural enough for Atkinson to be considerably embarrassed by such a find, since it would have been wildly out of context according to his view of the Neolithic world. But when one digs into the literature, one finds that at least 1300 bluestone fragments are reputed to have been found on or inside the hill! Have they all been misidentified? That’s very unlikely.  In an article published in 1991 Geoffrey Kellaway claimed to have in his possession a boulder of Ordovician ignimbrite (a highly brecciated rock resulting from an explosive volcanic eruption) found at Stonehenge during Howley’s excavations during the 1920‘s. Robert Newall kept possession of the boulder for more than half a century before passing it to Kellaway -- but it has now disappeared. Other rumours involve a cluster of bluestones in a garden and a strange boulder in a hedge somewhere else on Salisbury Plain. Delicate negotiations are necessary with a view to these stones being examined and identified as to rock type. They may or may not be significant. Bluestone monoliths were indeed taken from Stonehenge and used for ornamental or building purposes -- and in these cases the shapes of the stones may prove to be more revealing than their lithology.

When people say (as they often do) that the bluestones cannot be glacial erratics because there are no others anywhere on Salisbury Plain, they are clearly wrong. It is true that there are no large bluestone monoliths known on the chalklands, but there are certainly quite abundant smaller bluestones, and we should always bear in mind the old dictum that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Who knows what might still turn up, maybe on the extensive terrains currently occupied by the armed forces and inadequately explored?