What did HH Thomas know about the extent of glaciation?

I have been digging up some more info about what HH Thomas knew or did not know when he presented his controversial views on the transport of the bluestones in 1923.  (And in 1921, actually......)  

Let's take 1910 as a reasonable date to look at.  The "state of play" was determined at the time by such senior geologists and "glacialists" as James Geikie (far more important than his older brother Sir Archibald), Carvill Lewis, Frederick Wright,  Thomas Jehu and John Wesley Judd. 

Henry Carvill Lewis (1853-1888) , an American who did much fieldwork in the British Isles.  He proposed that the edge of the great Ice Age glaciation in Britain  coincided with a line of prominent moraines and other features which could be traces across country.  At first he found it difficult to accept that traces (such as erratic boulders) south of his limit were genuinely related to the presence of glacier ice, and he initially assigned them to some great Ice Age Flood. But later in his all-too-short life he fell into line with Geikie and others and did accept that the maximum position of the ice edge in the Ice Age was well to the south of his hypothetical line. 

 

Prof James Geikie (1839-1915), a Scottish geologist who was convinced that there was very extensive glaciation in the Ice Age, and that the ice limit in SW England lay somewhere off the Cornish coast. he was also active in promoting the idea that there had been several glaciations, separated by warmer intervals or interglacials.

Frederick Wright’s map of 1895, showing a strange ice limit across South Wales, based in part on Carvill Lewis’s identification of assumed terminal moraines. Wright ignored the abundant records of far-travelled erratics to the south of this line.

Europe and the greatest extent of glaciation during the Ice Age. From “Prehistoric Europe - A Geological Sketch”, by James Geikie (Edward Stanford, London, 1881). Note that Geikie incorporates the whole of the Bristol Channel area into the glaciated area, with an ice edge on or near Salisbury Plain……..

In this map, also from Wright (1895) a highly generalised line, based on the work of James Geikie, is drawn well to the south of the “moraines” identified by Carvill Lewis. Geikie recognised that the abundance of glacial erratics around the Bristol Channel coasts indicated extensive glaciation, at least as far south as the Cornish coast.

Extract from Harmer’s “erratic map” of 1928, showing erratic boulders and ”drift” exposures in abundant locations including South Pembrokeshire, Gower, Glamorgan and the Ilfracombe district — all to the south of the “moraines” mapped by Carvill Lewis. The work on this map was done between 1902 and 1913, and it must have been known to HH Thomas.

Prof Thomas Jehu (1871-1943) was born in Wales and later spent most of his working career in Scotland. As a young man he studied the glacial deposits of North Pembrokeshire, and published his findings in a highly regarded article in 1904. He recognized a tripartite succession in the drift sequence of Pembrokeshire -- namely Lower boulder clay, Middle sands and gravels, and Upper boulder-clay.  He characterised the latter deposit as a "rubbly drift" -- this is now recognized as a mixed deposit of melt-out till, flowtill and ablation till, rearranged and redeposited in a chaotic ice wastage environment.  Jehu agreed with Hicks that the Irish Sea ice that affected North Pembrokeshire flowed across the county from NW towards SE -- thus contradicting Geikie who had earlier portrayed the ice as having travelled from NE towards SW,

 Prof John Wesley Judd (1940-1916) was a prominent geologist who specialised in petrology.  He was Professor of Geology in the Royal College of Science and at Imperial College, and also President of the Geological Society.  Because he was London-based, he was right at the centre of things, and knew all about what was going on in assorted disputes and areas of progress.  He participated actively in the Stonehenge bluestone debate, and provided comments or additional material to some of the prominent archaeologists includingGowland and Hawley.  In 1901, Judd suggested that the bluestones at Stonehenge were erratics of glacial origin. He argued that the debris at Stonehenge had come from North Pembrokeshire or North Wales. He also observed that in areas affected by very ancient glaciations, most of the till had been eroded away by natural processes, leaving only a thin scatter of erratics here and there. Further, he observed that hard stones (including bluestones) left behind on Salisbury Plain would have been targetted down through the centuries for building purposes simply because neither chalk nor flint makes good building material.  Intriguingly, Judd concentrated not on the 43 known bluestone monoliths or orthostats themselves, but on the Stonehenge debitage. He found an extraordinary assortment of soft or fragile stones.  He made the point specifically that this material did not seem to be very closely related to the remaining standing bluestones -- so he concluded that only the hardest stones had survived, with all the other material breaking down and becoming incorporated into the soil layer over many thousands of years.  Judd suggested the presence of a “Stonehenge moraine” incorporating an abundance of foreign stones which would have been readily available to the builders of Stonehenge. He also argued -- perfectly plausibly -- that “stone availability” (of both bluestones and the larger sarsens) might have actually determined the precise position of the monument. 

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All things considered, the accumulated evidence shows that by 1910 the broad outlines of glaciation in the Bristol Channel / Celtic Sea arena were already established, involving thick and active ice carrying erratics and other glacial materials from the NW across Pembrokeshire and up the Bristol Channel, affecting the coasts of South Wales and the South-West Peninsula. In making his claims about the impossibility of bluestone transport towards Stonehenge HH Thomas wilfully ignored a great amount of evidence in the printed literature, and wilfully misrepresented the opinions of senior "glacialists". It is quite extraordinary that he got away with it -- but that, maybe, was because he was a geologist talking to archaeologists or antiquarians. If he had been a geologist talking to other geologists, he would certainly not have got away with it.  They would have had his guts for garters. 

Interestingly enough, the great majority of the articles published by Ixer and Bevins in recent years have also been published in archaeological journals -- and presumably they have been refereed for the most part by archaeologists. What a strange coincidence........!!