My contribution to experimental archaeology...........

 

I found this historic photo in the file --- taken on the day I helped out with the haulage of the Millennium Stone, back ion the year 2000.  It was a haulage exercise, but note that we were pushing rather than pulling -- because an adviser to the project said that this would minimise the risk of injury.  It was a jolly occasion, with lots of cameraderie amongst the pullers.  Philip Bowen, the organizer of the project, stands on the right in his yellow jacket.

Here we are crossing the Slebech Estate bridge over the Eastern Cleddau, at Blackpool Mill.  In the good old days of the Neolithic, of course, there would not have been a bridge -- just another horrible muddy tidal river with impenetrable jungle along its banks.

A couple of days after this photo was taken, the stone was taken off its sledge and transferred to two curraghs, with the help of a heavy lift crane.  Unfortunately the technology was not quite up to it, and the stone slid onto the bottom of the river and had to be recovered before starting its ill-fated journey to the docks at Milford Haven.

And the rest is history........

Top Ten Pembrokeshire erratics

1. Picrite boulder at Porthlysgi, near St Davids.  A very famous erratic made of "picrite" which appears very different from anything known in Wales -- therefore it is suggested that it might have come from Scotland.    It fell over the cliff and was lost for many years, but then it was hauled back up the cliff again in a heroic erratic rescue.  In May 2023 I found it again and recorded its precise position on the clifftop.

----------------------------------

2.  The Flimston boulders.  There are seven of them in the old churchyard, gathered up from the surrounding area and intended to be used as grave headstones.  Four of them stand in a row and have memorial tablets affixed -- the other three are lying unused in the long grass.  Origins are unknown, but the best bet at the moment is that the boulders have come from the St Davids Peninsula.

-------------------------------

3.  The Sleek Stone "super erratics" near Broad Haven.  There are several of them, the largest of which weighs c 75 tonnes.  It is a quartz porphyry, according to Cantrill -- possibly from Ramsey Island.  It rests on a broken platform of Coal Measures sandstones and shales.

------------------------

4.  The Ramsey Sound super erratic, made of grey or purple tuff.  Origin: possibly Ramsey Island.  It has probably not travelled far -- there are outcrops of the same rock type in the vicinity.

-------------------------------

5.  Druidston super-erratic.  An enormous erratic located in the valley upstream from the beach.  Difficult to get at, but it appears to be a dolerite, probably from the St David's Peninsula.

--------------------------------

6.  St Bride's Haven erratic pair.  These dolerite erratics are on the beach at the head of the bay -- you walk past them if you are walking on the coast path.  They rest on ORS bedrock -- the colour difference makes the erratics stand out prominently..

-----------------------------

7.  Llan spotted dolerite erratics, Lampeter Velfrey.  Spotted dolerite erratics incorporated into a ruined burial chamber on the lowlands of South Pembrokeshire (nearly all underlain by sedimentary rocks).

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8.  Glan yr Afon erratic cluster, near Crosswell.  I'm mystified by these, because they are nearly all spotted dolerites -- but found to the NORTH of Mynydd Preseli within sight of the nearest known spotted dolerite tor called Carn Goedog.  But iceflow here was (or so we think) from the north towards the south. Were the boulders carried north by the ice of a small local ice cap?  Did they come from a spotted dolerite poutcrop that we know nothing about?  Or are they not in a natural position at all -- were they collected up by people in historic time, looking for attractive building stones?

--------------------------------

9.  The Loving Stone, Loveston Farm, near Kilgetty.  This massive igneous erratic is clearly not in its original position.  It must have been found nearby, but it has been moved around in the farmyard, having been treated as a nuisance.  It has probably come from the St Davids Peninsula.

----------------------------------

10.  The Russia Stone, near Cwm Gwaun.  This massive monolith is one of a cluster of stones known as the Russia Stones. Some of the stones might have been used in Neolithic stone settings, but the farmer told me that this one was recumbent and was moved a short distance so that it could be used as a gatepost.  This stone has probably not travelled far -- there are a number of dolerite outcrops in the vicinity.

-------------------------------------

Note:  I have resisted the temptation to include perched blocks in this list.  There are plenty of them -- but although they may have been dislodged from their original positions by overriding ice, most of them have only travelled a few metres, so they are not quite erratic enough to make the list.

The Cardigan Bay glaciers

From Patton et al, 2013, modified.  The three big outlet glaciers draining westwards from the Welsh Ice cap were the Tremadog, Mawddach and Dyfi Glaciers.  Separating them are the three sarns ++  long ridges of morainic debris exposed only at low tides.  They have much mythology attached ++ relating to Cantreär Gwaelod or the lost Lowland Hundred.  See other posts on this blog.  The confluence or contact between Welsh Ice and Irish Sea Ice shown on this map must have moved eastards and westwards as the relative strengths of the two ice streams changed over time within and between glaciations.  The survival of the sarns shows that the last significant glacial episode to affect this area must have involved an expansion of the Welsh outlet glaciers. They would not have survived an assault by Irish Sea Ice flowingv from the N and NW.

Rapid marine deglaciation : Asynchronous retreat dynamics between the Irish Sea Ice Stream and terrestrial outlet glaciers
December 2013
Earth Surface Dynamics 1(1)
DOI: 10.5194/esurf-1-53-2013
H. Patton et al

 

Outlet Glacier flowlines and surface velocities, after Patton et al.

The view from high above Pwllheli, as it might have been.....

Irish Sea ice and Tonfanau erratics

With ref to this interesting site report from John Mason:

https://geologywales.co.uk/storms/winter14c.htm

I was intrigued by the images of far-travelled metamorphic erratics found on the beach at Tonfanau -- on the northern coast of Cardigan Bay.  Thanks to John for allowing the use of the pics.

John says that these rocks are not local, and that they remind him of some of the rocks in the Lewisian / Torridonian / Moine sequence in northern Scotland. In the text of his blog, John says: 

"All sorts of other rock-types are to be found here (ie on the beach): perhaps the most exotic are the rare boulders and pebbles of high-grade metamorphic rock, reminiscent of the ancient, 2-3 billion year old rocks of NW Scotland. They consist of quartz, pink and white feldspars, glittering spangles of white and black mica and, in some cases, garnets - small examples of which are visible (small, intense red areas) in the photo with the 50p piece."

"There is one area on the beach, usually covered over by sand, where a number of large blocks of these metamorphic rocks lie embedded in the moraine, like the one in the image below (found in 1998), which is about half a metre long. Its more angular-looking underside is where it was embedded in the clay matrix of the moraine. The general scarcity of high-grade metamorphic rocks, and the occurrence of so many of them in the one spot, has led me to suspect that it all arrived together in one mass of ice - perhaps an iceberg, calved off some far-distant glacier and incorporated into the ice-sheet - that subsequently grounded here and, melting away, released its payload of rocks that it had brought from far away." 

Interesting stuff.  It's known that at Tonfanau, in the Devensian Glaciation, Welsh ice from the uplands of Snowdonia and Cader Idris flowed out into the bay across the coast -- but later this ice was displaced by the ice of the Irish Sea Ice Stream, which must by then have been immensely powerful.  I don't accept that these boulders can have been carried by floating ice -- sea level was far too low at the time, near the time of the glacial maximum..

Of course, we know of other assumed Scottish erratics in Pembrokeshire and on the Bristol Channel coasts, but if any of these have come from these ancient rock outcrops in NW Scotland, that means they must have come from north of the Highland Boundary Fault -- but this area was (according to all the text books and learned papers) affected by ice flowing west or north-west, ie on the northern flank of the ice shed.  On the southern flank of that same ice shed the ice fed the Irish Sea Ice Stream and flowed southwards.

This is an intriguing dilemma.  I wonder what the truth of the matter might be?  This might of course be of some relevance to the current Altar Stone debate.......

Patton, H., & Hambrey, M. J. (2009). Ice-marginal sedimentation associated with the Late Devensian Welsh Ice Cap and the Irish Sea Ice Stream: Tonfanau, West Wales. Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 120(4), 256-274.

 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pgeola.2009.10.004

BRITICE Devensian ice sheet animation: a model for the Wolstonian?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABxYza9ELM

This BRITICE animation, from 6 years ago, is suddenly relevant again because of the latest research showing that the pattern of glaciation assumed to be more or less correct for the Anglian glaciation may in fact accurately represent the ice extent of the Wolstonian British and Irish ice sheet.  In turn, the "extreme" model generated for the Devensian seems to fit rather well, with ice extent somewhat greater than that of the Late Devensian.

The model at 21 K shows approximate maximum ice extent. This is really interesting, as it shows rapidly streaming ice crossing western Pembrokeshire, with more sluggish ice in the east.  It shows the thin local ice caps of Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor incorporated into the main body of ice, with Irish Sea ice flowing between them and affecting the whole of the SW Peninsula.  That makes glaciological sense.  Then -- and this is really interesting -- the model throws up a stream of rapidly moving ice pushing far into the Somerset Levels depression almost as far as the English Channel coast.  I had not noticed this feature before -- but of course it backs up what I have suggested, and also the claim (made by Gilbertson and Hawkins many years ago) that glacier ice penetrated as far east as Salisbury Plain.

Watch this space......

The view from Pwllheli

There are always parallels.  I was looking for an illustration of what things might have looked like at the northern end of Cardigan Bay around the time of the LGM  and I found this splendid image of the Lower Skelton Glacier in Antarctica....

Just imagine that the photo was taken above Pwllheli, looking south.  On the right is Cardigan Bay, filled with the streaming ice of the Irish Sea Ice Stream.  On the left are the uplands of north Wales, with mountainous headlands separated by deep troughs carrying ice from the Welsh Ice Cap.  The junction between Welsh ice and Irish Sea ice runs along near the centre of the image, near the line of the present coast, with areas of dead ice separated by tributary streams of Welsh ice which are diverted southwards.  At first the Welsh ice dominates, with the contact zone pushed over towards the right (west) edge of the photo.  Any deposits laid on the coast are related to this Welsh ice.  But then the Irish Sea Ice dominates, pushing the contact zone in towards the mountain front.  Deposits laid along the position of the modern coast are nor related to this powerful ice stream carrying erratics from the north, including some from Scotland.......

There's nothing new under the sun.......

An erratic work of art.........

 

 

One of the family took this photo back in the jolly month of July, showing that erratics are not just of scientific interest, but have an artistic side to them as well.............

On comminution and giant erratics

Igneous geology of the west of Scotland (Wikipedia)

On a walk near the edge of the Nevern estuary (Parrog, Newport) yesterday, I found a couple of small pebbles which I think have come from Ailsa Craig.  They are microgranites with small bluish speckles and signs of some larger lighter coloured minerals, but the matrix is slightly pinkish -- rather than the pure white of genuine fresh Ailsa Crain riebeckite or micro granite.  

I'm not sure how unique the Ailsa Craig microgranite is, since related rocks also occur on the island of Arran -- no matter, since we can be reasonably sure that the pebbles have come from that general area of the Firth of Clyde.  There is nothing similar, as far as I know, on the Isle of Man or in North Wales.

The "curling stone granite" from Trefor Quarry in North Wales looks very different:

The blue, grey and pink granite used for curling stones -- from Trefor Quarry in North Wales.

Wikipedia:

Ailsa Craig is a spectacular, conical island in the Firth of Clyde about 20 km south of Arran (P914119). It is formed by a boss of peralkaline microgranite intruded into Triassic rocks. The microgranite is characterised by riebeckitic arfvedsonite and Zr-rich aegirine (Harding, 1983; Harrison et al., 1987); aenigmatite also occurs (Howie and Walsh, 1981). This distinctive rock-type is a widespread glacial marker southwards on either side of the Irish Sea (p. 160). It has traditionally been a favoured lithology for the manufacture of curling stones (p. 173).

Ailsa Craig curling stone quarry -- human being for scale

Anyway, the really interesting thing about these small pebbles with bluish spots is that they are all very small.  I have not seen one which is larger than a human fist.  Many thousands of tonnes of Ailsa Craig rock must have been removed  by overriding ice, and the original entrained blocks must have been of all shapes and sizes.  There is no reason to think that they were uniquely small before they started their journeys southwards towards Wales or westwards towards Donegal.

One of the assumptions in glacial geomorphology is that as large erratics travel within or under a glacier they are subjected to an assortment of processes which combine to cause comminution -- the gradual reduction in size as the rock mass is broken, broken again and then broken again until there is not much left apart from small pebbles.  These pebbles may be sub-angular, sub-rounded or rounded, and if water is involved towards the end of the journey they may even be well-rounded.

Different rules apply to supra-glacial transport because debris on a glacier surface is not subjected to abrasion or pressure-induced fracturing.  As Lionel Jackson and I explained many years ago in our article on the 930 km long Foothills Erratic Train in Alberta, Canada and the "Big Rocks" erratic cluster near Okatoks, huge rock masses that fall onto a glacier surface as a result of cliff collapse can be carried hundreds and even thousands of kilometres with relatively little modification.  The angularity of the giant erratics and their related debris may actually be increased as a result of frost (freeze-thaw) processes.

https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/stonehenges-mysterious-stones

The biggest erratic at Okatoks -- calculated to be 16,500 tonnes in weight.

Closer to home, we have other giant erratics on the shores of the Bristol Channel, including those at Limeslade, Lydstep, Freshwater Gut, Westonzoyland (now destroyed), Saunton and Shebbear, and on the tip of the South-West Peninsula at Porthleven.  

The famous Freshwater Gut (Baggy Point) erratic, made of granulite gneiss from Western Scotland (photo: Paul Berry).  It is reputed to weigh 50 tonnes.

So why is it that some clasts are comminuted down to pebble size over a glacial transport distance of 500 km, while other giant erratics survive?  Well, it has to be admitted that the great majority of clasts are broken down, while the giant erratic survivors are the great exceptions.  I have speculated before on this blog about the preferential survival of dolerite boulders in transport, and it seems that igneous boulders have a better chance of long-distance survival than sedimentary or metamorphic rocks.  If you look at a typical Pembrokeshire storm beach you will find that the great majority of pebbles and boulders have come from degraded or destroyed glacial and glaciofluvial deposits; maybe 90% of the clasts will not have travelled far, and maybe 10% will be from sources far away.

The clasts found in glacial deposits are typically of all shapes, sizes and lithologies, with variable surface characteristics as well.  Some will be polished and striated, and others will not be.  Some will have the "ideal" bullet shape, like the famous Newall Boulder found at Stonehenge, and others will be roughly rectilinear or even roughly rounded. 

 

So to answer the question raised above, I will have to say that we currently do not know why some giant erratics survive while others are broken down into small pebbles.  My best guess is that every clast undergoes a unique journey, related to its changing position in, or on, or under the ice; related to ice temperature and velocity and other glaciological conditions; related to rock type and internal structure; and related to distance travelled.  Is all of this random?  Well, not really -- the laws of physics apply, but as yet we do not fully understand them.  But "chance"factors come into play  -- for example when one clast in a vulnerable position is suddenly assaulted by something harder, sharper and heavier........

One final point.  Giant erratics are NOT restricted to the intertidal zone around British coasts.  That is a myth repeated over and again, even in learned publications.  So their distribution has nothing whatsoever to do with transport by floating ice.

Black kettles and even blacker pots

I was looking up something on Herbert Thomas the other day, and was reminded about these two articles by our good friends Ixer and Bevins:

"Carn Alw as a source of the rhyolitic component of the Stonehenge bluestones: a critical reappraisal of the petrographical account of H.H. Thomas".
Richard E. Bevins, Rob A. Ixer
Journal of Archaeological Science, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Apr 2013
doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.03.017
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313001076


"Retracing the footsteps of H.H. Thomas: a review of his Stonehenge bluestone provenancing study".
Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer
Antiquity, May 2018.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.10
Published online: 31 May 2018

Quote:

At the time of undertaking his Stonehenge provenancing work (in the period 1920–
1923), Thomas was not actively undertaking fieldwork in the Mynydd Preseli area, and
had to rely predominantly on the set of samples he collected in 1906 (totalling 15
samples from the whole area between Rosebush and Crymych), on 13 samples in the
survey collection from Cunnington, and on the works and specimens of Parkinson and
Part. In essence, Thomas had an incomplete and unrepresentative set of samples from
the Mynydd Preseli, and a limited opportunity to study these rocks systematically in the
field.

Quote:
Our main conclusion is that the provenances for the bluestones as presented by Thomas
are not based on reliable evidence, but appear to have been influenced predominantly by
a set of samples collected during a single field excursion to the Mynydd Preseli in 1906,
14 years before his investigation of Stonehenge. He also had to rely on samples and thin
sections from other sources, which led to a bias in the sample available for comparison;
this was especially the case for Parkinson’s thin sections, which were predominantly
from the outcrop of Carn Alw, reflecting Parkinson’s interest in spherulitic rhyolites.
Hence, Thomas’s claims about the proposed sources of the Stonehenge bluestones are
unreliable.

Quote:
Our work also highlights how easy it is to accept published findings as ‘gospel’ without
challenge. This has been the case with Thomas’s paper for over 80 years.

This is wonderful stuff, coming from two geologists who have produced a flood of papers over the last decade, based on hardly any new fieldwork but on detailed analyses of rock fragments of uncertain provenance and dusty old thin sections from museum collections.  They criticise Thomas for depending on "an incomplete and unrepresentative set of samples",  for using unreliable evidence, for using samples from the debitage rather than from the monoliths themselves, and for relying on "samples and thin sections from other sources."   

They are clearly going after HHT -- and seeking to discredit him -- for failing to do proper fieldwork in which he could collect fully authenticated samples from named localities with accurate grid references..........  

This is hypocrisy of the highest order, and for the last decade or so I have been criticising the two geologists and assorted colleagues for basing pretty outrageous claims (about supposedly accurate bluestone provenancing) on extremely old and unreliable samples found in dusty shoeboxes and museum display cabinets.  Their sampling programmes have been hugely biased from the very beginning of their research.  The argument about the authenticity of Altar Stone samples (including infamous slide 277) has gone on for many years, as outlined on this blog, and is still unresolved.

But they do not seem to learn.  Here we go again, with the fiasco of the new Altar Stone provenancing work -- based on hardly any new field sampling and placing huge significance on two unauthenticated "Altar Stone" samples and two other bits of sandstone purchased from a rock shop in Whitby. That is a ludicrous state of affairs.  Because of the shortcomings of their sampling programme,  they have published two papers within a couple of weeks, with one showing results that are dramatically different from the other.  I am not a geologist, but I really do wonder what serious independent geologists make of this palaver.........  answers on a postcard please.

In an article today the "Independent" newspaper asks: "What does the latest study say on the Altar Stone?"  That's not the right question.  They should have asked "What does the latest study tell us about the geologists involved?"

===============

The Stonehenge Bluestone Debate - Glacial Transport & The Altar Stone

Here is the full video.   I imagine that very many of Coral and Jacky's followers will never have encountered any of this before......  some will no doubt be outraged by the lack of respect which I show towards our learned archaeological friends......

The big interview goes online

It would be nice to get something like this on mainstream TV, but that's probably too much to hope for.........  Anyway, just a month after the publication of the first video on the Stonehenge Bluestone Debate, Jacky and Coral have produced another one.  Episode 2 is about the glacial transport hypothesis and the Altar Stone controversy.  It's based largely on an interview I did with Jacky in our garden on 18th August.  It's virtually unedited, and runs for c 40 mins with a front end and a back end added on in the studio.

Here it is:

https://youtu.be/idbEst34aEw?si=vLuTlNkoPHaZRYbg

I hope you enjoy watching it.  Jacky and Coral have put a huge amount of work into it -- digging up a multitude of appropriate illustrations and even inventing some graphics of their own.  I may be biased, but I think they have done rather a good job and contributed something worthwhile to the public debate........

Bluestone science makes a huge advance, backwards

In some discussion about the bluestones generally and the Altar Stone in particular, on social media, somebody posted this the other day:  "What better way to get both your publication rate and citation rate up than to start arguing with yourself! Genius!"

I agree.  This is incredibly clever.  The bluestone geologists (we all know who they are) seem to have developed this brilliant new technique of writing a flood of papers, completely ignoring the published opinions of all who say anything inconvenient, and then writing more papers in which they disagree with themselves.

It happened with the "Neolithic" quarrying articles in the years following 2015, when they ignored two key peer-reviewed articles (written by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and myself) because we accepted hardly any of their extravagant claims.  They ignored other evidence published on Researchgate relating to Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  They were 100% focussed on shouting from the rooftops about "the Pompeii of Neolithic quarries" and about "monolith extraction on an industrial scale".  Since then they have rowed back significantly from those claims, and while they still claim to have discovered quarries they have had to accept that maybe one or two stones might have been moved from the sites about which they got so excited.  All the other stones at Stonehenge have probably, they now say,  come from other sites -- some of those not associated with Mynydd Preseli.  Needless to say, even that revised position is disputed. 

It happened in the Waun Mawn "Lost Circle" fiasco, in which they flagged up an amazing "discovery" backed up with state-of-the-science analytical techniques and then used high profile media promotion to sell it to the world.  The "learned" papers and ancillary popular articles are there for all to see.  Before going into print, they ignored the research findings and the opinions of others who know the territory far better than they do, and basked in the media glory while the going was good.  Then they ignored the criticisms of their papers, which included detailed scrutiny of their evidence.  Then they "discovered" in new articles that their previous findings were unreliable,  that none of the stones at Stonehenge had come from Waun Mawn, that the stones used in the "Lost Circle" were all locally derived, and that the Lost Circle never existed anyway. And so, they said, all things considered, there was no link of any sort between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge.  Big deal -- we all knew that anyway.

And now it has happened again. Shocking new research!!   Having said in a big paper in "Nature" journal that the Altar Stone had come from the Orcadian Basin and having implied that the prime "provenancing candidate" was Orkney, the geologists got massive global media coverage   -- which of course happens several times a year when somebody or other publishes something claimed to rewrite the text books and to "overturn the established Stonehenge narrative....."    You know the sort of thing.......  Well, blow me down, the ink on the Sun's banner headlines had hardly dried when along comes another paper written by, among others, the very same three geological musketeers, and saying that the Altar Stone had nothing whatsoever to do with Orkney..........

As I have noted before, this pantomime is portrayed (by those involved) as excellent science in which top experts assemble evidence, create hypotheses, test them and reject or replace them.  That's all very fine, but this is not excellent science at all -- it involves rushing into print with dramatic conclusions based on very scanty evidence, a refusal to acknowledge that the conclusions and even the evidence itself is hotly disputed, and an apparent determination to ignore all evidence that is inconvenient to the hypothesis being promoted.  The work involves biased sampling, failure to test field findings against control digs, assumptions dressed up as facts, and the ongoing use of ruling hypotheses.  I am not the only one who is less than impressed..........

Is this all deliberate?  Or can it really be the case that these guys do not have a clue what they are doing?

HH Thomas 1923 -- that infamous article is now accessible

Over and again I have picked up on complaints that the infamous 1923 article by HH Thomas -- on the subject of the Stonehenge bluestones -- has been impossible to find anywhere on the web.  It's more than 100 years old.  In some digitised collections in the USA the other volumes of the Antiquaries Journal are available, but not Volume 3.  All very strange.  As far as I can gather, Cambridge Journals  -- which took over responsibility for the old defunct journal -- has not digitised it either.  

So as a service to mankind, I have digitised my very old and battered version of the article as a "presentation"  -- and in no way claiming ownership or responsibility for the contents.

I hope that many people will read the article.  For all its failings, it is a very important contribution, and it's better that members of the public, and future researchers, read the full article and do not depend endlessly on what other people say about it!

Here is the link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383778469_The_Source_of_the_Stones_of_Stonehenge_by_Herbert_Thomas_1923_scanned_version

Thunderous media silence on the latest Altar Stone story

 The Stones of Stenness

Isn't it interesting that with regard to the latest "discovery" that the Altar Stone could not have come from Orkney (Bevins et al, 30 August), there has not been any media coverage whatsoever?  No banner headlines, no TV news reports, no specially commissioned YouTube videos, no radio news items.........

We can also assume, therefore that there has been no press release accompanying the publication of the article.  Why not, I wonder?

The other extraordinary thing is the speed of publication. Received 23 July 2024, accepted 22 August 2024, available online 30 August 2024.  Barely a month passed between the submission of the article and its publication online. That means that there cannot possibly have been any peer review.  If there had been, it would have been acknowledged at the end of the paper.

So it was a hastily produced correction to the rather forceful suggestion (not a direct claim) that Orkney was the probable source of the Altar Stone in the "Nature" paper by Clarke et al, published just a couple of weeks earlier.

What a shambles.......

Orkney stakes its claim on the Altar Stone

 

It didn't take long for Orkney to claim the Altar Stone as one of its own, a sacred stone associated with an older, existing megalithic culture on Orkney, and then exported off down to the deep south as an item of great value and significance.  

Once you start a story rolling, it just gets bigger and bigger,  and to hell with what the science actually tells you.  Now where have we heard that before?

https://frontiersmagazine.org/stones-across-the-sea/

On 21st August The Scotsman developed the same fantasy to an extraordinary degree, with Dr Alison Sheridan (former principal curator of prehistory at National Museum of Scotland) weaving a wondrous take of cultural links between Orkney and Stonehenge -- all based on the assumption that everything in the paper by Clarke et al was factually correct.  Some people find it rather hard to differentiate between an opinion and a discovery.

https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/scottish-stone-at-stonehenge-may-have-been-diplomatic-gift-to-boost-sacredness-4749523

Truly, the gullibility of the predisposed knows no bounds.......  and there is no doubt that the intention of the work by Clarke et al was to demonstrate a cultural link between Orkney and Stonehenge.  The choice of the Cruaday Quarry sample as the "key to the Altar Stone mystery"was no accident......

PS.   These articles were published before the latest research which purports to show that the Altar Stone could NOT have come from Orkney...........

==================

PPS. Post modified and updated on 4 Sept 2024

The Altar Stone Fiasco -- much mud on faces

 I wonder where this is going to end?  Let's just remind ourselves of the facts.  Two papers have appeared in supposedly reputable and high-ranking scientific journals -- details as below:

(1) Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. 2024. Anthony J. I. Clarke, Christopher L. Kirkland, Richard E. Bevins, Nick J. G. Pearce, Stijn Glorie & Rob A. Ixer. Nature 632, 15 Aug 2024, pp 570-587. (Received 16 December 2023 and accepted 3 June 2024.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07652-1

(2) Was the Stonehenge Altar Stone from Orkney? Investigating the mineralogy and geochemistry of Orcadian Old Red sandstones and Neolithic circle monuments. 2024. Bevins, R., Pearce, N., Hillier, S., Pirrie, D., Ixer, R. A., Andò, S., Barbarano, M., Power, M. R., & Turner, P. (2024). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 58, Article 104738. Advance online publication. Received 23 July 2024, Accepted 22 August 2024, Available online 30 August 2024

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104738

Note that Bevins, Ixer and Pearce are cited as co-authors in both publications.  That means that they share corporate responsibility for the contents and conclusions of both papers; they cannot escape from that academic convention.  The first paper argues that on the basis of scientific evidence the Altar Stone came from an Orcadian source -- either from inland Caithness or from the Mainland of Orkney, with a strong preference for the latter since the authors argue for sea transport rather than overland transport.  The second paper argues strongly -- largely on the basis of pXRF evidence -- that the Altar Stone cannot possibly have come from Orkney.  Since the Orkney sample (from Cruaday Quarry, near Vestrafiold) is taken by the researchers as a proxy for the whole ORS Orcadian Basin, that means that the attribution of the Altar Stone to somewhere in Orcadia is also likely to be incorrect.

How is it that the same authors can have been involved in two papers, published just two weeks apart, drawing dramatically opposed conclusions?   Ixer, Bevins and Pearce all shared in the limelight when paper (1) was published, popping up all over the place on the telly, in YouTube videos, newspapers and magazine articles, telling the world with glee about the astonishing and even shocking research findings based on cutting-edge zircon grain dating techniques.  And yet they must have known, when they did all these interviews, that paper (2) was due for imminent publication -- showing that the findings of their earlier paper were deeply problematical.............

The reputational damage here is immense.  People will have noticed that paper (2) casts serious doubts on the methods and conclusions of paper (1) -- and this implies that paper (1) should have been held back until its reliability had been further reviewed.  Of course, the Three Musketeers might argue that the first paper suggested the Orcadian Basin ORS (centred on the Moray Firth) as an Altar Stone source, with the second paper dealing just with Mainland Orkney -- leaving open the possibility that the Altar Stone could have come from one of the other Orcadian Basin sandstone outcrops.  But if you are going to take just one or two samples bought from a rock shop in Whitby and use them to draw earth-shattering conclusions,  you are asking for trouble.  And if you base more big conclusions on a badly designed research programme on Orkney, you are inviting trouble again, greatly multiplied. 

No, this is bad science and the whole shambles brings no credit to anybody.  Some of us have had severe reservations about the quality of this work from the very beginning -- and now a great number of people have mud on their faces.  That includes the geologists who wrote these papers, Mike Pitts (who was gushing in his published praise for paper number one), and the editors of "Nature" and "Archaeological Science" journals..............

Oh dear -- start all over again, chaps......... and dig a bit deeper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02i6w8c4tYM