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Saturday 8 June 2024

"Lost Bluestone Boulder" -- Quaternary Science Journal article now available on Researchgate

 


Some of the features of the boulder (courtesy BGS)

Here it is -- open access and issued under a Creative Commons license. So it is easy to get at, I hope.  No paywalls here, thank goodness.........

The article, published in Germany in a long-established journal which is part of the Copernicus Group, has a very tight publishing process.  The article took a year to get into print, partly because of the heavy involvement of two referees who raised quite different issues and who sometimes gave conflicting advice, which I and the editor had to negotiate as tactfully as we could. There were several rounds of consultations and manuscript drafts, so the input of the peer reviewers was considerable. There was heavy involvement from the editorial team as well.    Anyway, I tried to take all the advice offered -- and what started as a short note expanded inexorably into something far more substantial at the request of the referees.  

So I hope that this paper will have a role in opening up the bluestone debate and showing interested parties that there are several sides to every question.....

Enjoy!

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381205542_A_bluestone_boulder_at_Stonehenge_implications_for_the_glacial_transport_theory

6 comments:

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Great that this is now freely available..... You'll be fascinated checking how many people take a look......Luddites need not bother

Kate said...

So glad to see this! The Men-Dragging-Rocks juggernaut is finally starting to shudder to a halt!

Tony Hinchliffe said...

Kate, I always thought that notion was fantastical, fabulous and far - fetched! [ unless you happen to be Indiana Jones fan, Michael Parker Pearson, that is...]

Tony Hinchliffe said...

As the characters on Kenneth Horne's and Kenneth Williams' "Round the Horne" used to say back in the 1960s, "......lorst and gone". Thank goodness, sense is starting to prevail.

Steve Dickinson said...

The ‘boulder’ is a 22cm x 15cm x 10cm stone. Not a boulder at all. Quite easily slipped into a Neolithic backpack in Pembrokeshire and carried to Wiltshire😉

BRIAN JOHN said...

How big is a boulder -- that is the question! I have consulted widely on this, and the next size down is a cobble -- and that is a lot smaller. There are big boulders and little boulders. Of course the little ones were carted around the country by travelling salesmen and flogged to gullible Neolithic tribesmen on the pretence that they were excellent for making stone axes. That confidence trick no doubt led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the boulders proved to be quite worthless. Not a conchoidal fracture in sight.......