Video: Dispelling the Stonehenge Myth

 So we have considered the Mike Pitts version of events -- now here is mine, first put onto the web by the Do Lectures team about ten years ago.  I gave this lecture in September 2010.  I had just 30 mins at my disposal, so a lot of material had to be summarised or omitted -- but I managed to get my main points over.

Since 2010 a vast array of articles on Stonehenge and the bluestones have appeared -- but nothing has appeared that has caused me to substantially change my mind on anything, apart from some updates on the origins of the stones, thanks to the work of Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins.  It now appears (if the geological work is correct) that none of the bluestones at Stonehenge came from the rocky tors near Newport and Dinas, and it appears that there are not just 30 different Stonehenge bluestone provenances but more like 46.  (The geologists have some weird ideas about "true bluestones" and bluestones that are not worthy of the name, but I have dealt with that issue many times before and am not going to waste any more time on it........)   

The comments on the YouTube site are more entertaining than the lecture -- but that is the way of the world..........

RETROSPECT

My original talk for the "Do Lectures" was designed to be a piece of independent scrutiny of the things we thought we knew about Stonehenge.   It's hard to recall what life was like in those far-off days, but geologists Ixer and Bevins were just getting going on their mission to sort out the provenancing of the bluestones, having already pointed to the Pont Saeson area as a possible rhyolite source.   (They were of course following up on the work of the Open University team led by Richard Thorpe, who reported on a large Open University project in 1991, using petrography and geochemistry to analyse samples from the Stonehenge area and from West Wales;  they concluded unequivocally that the bluestones were glacially transported.)  In 2010 Darvill and Wainwright were involved in their SPACES project and were getting rather interested in Stonehenge bluestone sources, following their 2008 Stonehenge dig; Carn Meini was the preferred source for the spotted dolerite monoliths, reputed to display "substantial traces of prehistoric stone extraction".  Parker Pearson and his colleagues had not started digging in Mynydd Preseli; and there had been -- as far as I am aware -- no mention at all of possible quarries at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog or of a giant lost stone circle at Waun Mawn.  So those particular elements of the "modern bluestone myth" are very new indeed, coming and going away again in just ten years or so.......