A piece of ancient history

 This is from my very first post on this blog, in May 2009:

On this blog I want to take a hard look at the famous and ruinous old collection of stones which we call Stonehenge. English Heritage and most archaeologists seem to think that is all sorted, and that the stones were moved by Neolithic tribesmen from Preseli in West Wales all the way to Salisbury Plain. They cite the theory as if it is established fact. All very well, except that there is not a shred of evidence to support what they say.......

But there is a great deal of evidence which suggests that the bluestones are glacial erratics, picked up from more than 20 sites in West and South Wales, and carried eastwards by the ice of the great Irish Sea Glacier to various locations to the west of Stonehenge -- maybe in the vicinity of the Somerset Levels or the Mendip Hills.

If you read most of the specialist literature, it is simply assumed to be fact that the Neolithic tribes who built Stonehenge were capable of moving more than 80 large stones over a vast distance, over land and sea -- all the way from Carn Meini in Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. But where is the evidence in support of this? There is none -- but there is a vast amount of unscientific supposition, with assumption piled on assumption, and a great deal of circular reasoning as well. This is bad science, and such is the intolerance of the archaeology establishment to the idea of glacial stone transport that what we have effectively is a conspiracy. Not a conspiracy of silence, but a conspiracy to keep the glacial theory out of sight and out of mind. Why? I'll explore that one of these days. 

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A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, with 3,371 posts on a wide variety of topics (most of them relevant!), 19,450 comments, and 2,068,678 page views including 3,650 page views in the last week alone.  I like to think this is popular science at work, bearing in mind that most people nowadays can not access key learned articles because they are behind paywalls and because ongoing dialogue with researchers / article authors is difficult.  I am frequently slagged off and accused of bias, but I do try to assess or scrutinise things honestly, without fear or favour and without showing deference to those who are in high academic office!  I learned a very long time ago (when I was a research student in 1962-65) that professors talk rubbish just as much as normal people do, especially when they use long words and show highly impressive technical diagrams while telling us what to think.

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This is one of the earliest links -- to an article by Olwen Williams-Thorpe on the Open University web site which is just as relevant today as it was in 2008.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/heritage/stonehenge-another-perspective?blog=14