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Wednesday 22 June 2022

Dacites and the fictional orthostat

 Ixer and Bevins keep on publishing at a furious rate in conjunction with assorted colleagues-- I am not sure what the beloved WANHM magazine would do without them! The latest article is entitled "Stonehenge Dacite Group D -- fact or fiction?". WANHM Vol 115, pp xx - xx. Strange title, since if the group is a fiction it is fiction of their own inventing. It's like putting up an Aunt Sally in order to have the satisfaction of knocking it down.......

Anyway, the article is available via Academia for those who want to check it out.

We are all (and that includes the authors of this latest piece) confused by the sheer abundance of fragments (the authors never differentiate between "fragments" and pebbles or stones) of widely differing lithologies scattered across the Stonehenge landscape.  Most geologists, in their shoes, would have long since abandoned the very idea of bluestone quarries, since both monoliths and fragments are so hugely variable in their characteristics that they must have come from multiple locations in West Wales and further afield. But they insist on seeking to gather their samples into groups in an attempt to minimise the number of "provenences" because that is the only way they can maintain the human transport hypothesis;  it makes no sense at all for Neolithic tribesment to have wandered all over West West collecting up stones from here, there and everywhere just to cart them off to Stonehenge and then throw them away or break them up.

Anyway, here we go again, with 8 rather inconvenient fragments analysed and found not to match up with anything in particular.  They do seem to match with one another.  The authors do not know where they came from, and assume (without any foundation) that they must have come from a missing orthostat, and that they have most probably come from North Pembrokeshire.   They also consider that the fragmants are "true bluestones", whatever that may mean.

For the sake of completeness, here is the latest classification:


Hmmm -- just as we were getting used to Volcanic Group B, it's disappeared into thin air, to be replaced by Dacite Group B.  Whatever next?

In their conclusion the authors do consider the possibility that the unassigned dacite fragments might have been introduced to the area as glacial erratics, but they dismiss that option on the grounds that no other "unequivocal" glacial erratic has ever been found in the Stonehenge landscape.  One might ask: "What about all those bluestone boulders that make up the bluestone circle?"  And one might also ask: "What about Newall's ignimbrite boulder?"  Of which more anon.

And who gets to decide what is equivocal and what is unequivocal?  Are the famous bluestone quarries "unequivocal"?   Is MPP's "lost circle" unequivocal"?  Ixer and his friends may think so, but there are very many of us who beg to differ.





9 comments:

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Your acronyms a bit bent, Brian. The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine:WANHM.

Tony Hinchliffe said...

In the second - to - end paragraph, it sounds like them Good Ol' Boys, Ixer & Bevins, are of the same ( sound?) mind as Tim Daw. They all believe that no " unequivocal " glacial erratic has ever been found in the Stonehenge landscape. As I myself have pointed out to Mr Daw, what about all those bluestone boulders so obligingly photographed by Simon Benton for
his own website?? Are Daw, Bevins & Ixer joined at the hip, or just overcome by the mystique of that UCL Institute of Archaeology bloke's" ruling hypothesis " which he guards so preciously like Tolkein's Gollum? Answers on a postcard please.

Tony Hinchliffe said...

The problem for all right - thinking people with MPP's so - called ruling hypothesis is that, although MPP and his merry gang want it to rule the roost, it was always a house built on sand by nay - sayers with their heads deep in the sand surrounding that house.

But we have ROCKS. Erratic rocks.

BRIAN JOHN said...

Ah -- sorry about that. WANHM......

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Haven't even received my member's copy of this 2013 volume of the WANHM yet, Brian! Looks like I'm subsidising Wiltshire Museum's publishing's tardiness.

BRIAN JOHN said...

The trouble with ruling hypotheses is that they infect everything. The associated bias is apparent even in peer-reviewed articles, where reviewers should call it out, but seem just as ineffectual as their editors (who can of course have their own agendas relating to "impact" and media coverage).

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Last comment was MEANT to have said " this 2023 volume" of course

John Stainforth said...

Brian,

Has anyone ever considered the Rowley Hills dolerites as a potential provenance of some of the Stonehenge "bluestones"?

John Stainforth

BRIAN JOHN said...

The geologists have considered lots of potential sources -- but I guess there might be some that have not ben adequately sampled and recorded in the literature......