The Boles Barrow bluestone -- too inconvenient by far........

 

The Boles Barrow Bluestone, now in Salisbury Museum.  It is seriously damaged -- some of the damage is down to natural (glacial or periglacial) processes during and after glacial transport, some might be down to the use of hammer stones during the Neolithic, and some might be down to the use of metal tools following its removal from the burial mound.

On looking again at Part One of "Stonehenge for the Ancestors", one is struck by the extraordinary bias in Chapter 4, written by Mike Parker Person and Colin Richards, with some help from eight others.   

https://www.sidestone.com/books/stonehenge-for-the-ancestors-part-1

The biggest bias of all is of course the underlying presumption that the bluestones were transported to Stonehenge from West Wales at whatever time is deemed to be convenient, in spite of the fact that there is no evidence of any sort in favour of human transport.  That speculative leap leads in turn to a refusal by the authors even to consider the possibility that the bluestones were lying about in the Stonehenge landscape for maybe half a million years before being gathered up and used in the earliest stone monument.  The discussions and interpretations are fundamentally unscientific in that "alternative scenarios" are just not considered.  Sad, but I suppose we have all got used to it by now.........

On p 174, where the authors deal with the Boles Barrow bluestone, there is a spectacular shift of opinion by MPP, who has previously argued that the bluestone boulder found in the Early Neolithic Boles Barrow is the very same boulder as that is now displayed in Salisbury Museum, having been dropped off near Heytesbury by the stone-lugging tribesmen who were heading for Stonehenge.  That didn't suit the latest preferred chronology -- so here he and Richards refer to "the bluestone erroneously attributed to Boles Barrow".  Their reasoning is more than a little convoluted -- and I remain convinced that there is no reason to doubt the Boles Barrow attribution.   

The fact that the boulder in the museum has been "systematically worked by metal tools" says nothing about its origin and use in the Early Neolithic.  Certainly the boulder is seriously damaged,  but to assume that "metal tools" are responsible for most if not all of the damage would be foolish, since some of the damage might be down to natural processes during glacial transport, and some might be down to the use of hammer stones around the time that Boles Barrow was built.  And who knows what happened to it after it was "collected" by Cunnington and placed in his garden.   In short, we need much more information on the damage done to the surface of the stone..........