Mike Pitts and the "lost" megaliths that might not be lost at all.......

Some of the parchmarks in the turf at Stonehyenge.  Some of these may mark to positions of stones in the past, but then again, maybe not.........

This is a popular article written by Mike Pitts and published on the BBC  "Future" web site

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241220-the-archaeological-mystery-of-stonehenges-long-lost-megaliths

This is how BBC Future advertises itself:

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We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don't accept — we ask why.

In a complex, fast-paced world of soundbites, knee-jerk opinions and information overload, BBC Future provides something different: a home for slowing down, delving deep and shifting perspectives.

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Well well. Truth, facts and science. Evidence-based analysis, original thinking and so forth. Grand aspirations and claims. So does the Pitts article measure up? Not from where I'm standing. It is packed full of statements and claims that should have been checked and rejected by the BBC Future editorial team.

Bluestonehenge is mentioned but not named, and it is proposed that the pits there once held bluestones that were transported to Stonehenge. That is of course not universally accepted.

The claim that hardly a stone was left undamaged by stone collectors with hammers is somewhat over the top.  The laser survey of 2012 did reveal a great deal of surface damage, but it has been widely accepted since the days of Richard Atkinson that all but one of the bluestones in the bluestone circle are still in their "natural" state, and that the shaping and surface marking by humans is typical of the monoliths in the bluestone horseshoe.

The so-called parch marks in dry weather do NOT necessarily coincide with the positions of Stonehenge monoliths that have since been "lost".  On the contrary, most may simply mark the positions of pits that were dug for monoliths that never actually arrived -- or were never found by the builders who scoured the couhntryside round about.  These pits, like many others on the site, may simply provide evidence of one of many attempts at rearranging a limited number of stones.  Other pits mat be extraction pits from which smaller sarsens and bluestones were extracted from the places in which they were discovered.  Pitts avoids any mention of this possibility, although in the past he has acknowledged that Stonehenge may have been built  in a place where there was a convenient scatter of naturally occuirring monoliths.  On the site today there are only 40 sarsens and 43 bluestones; if there ever was an "immaculate Stonehenge" that means that 50% of the monoliths involved have disappeared.  To accept that is to be involved in a very considerable act of faith.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2020/08/unfinished-late-neolithic-monuments.html

With reference to the Boles Barrow spotted dolerite block, Pitts mentions the idea that it might have been glacially transported, but cites only Williams-Thorpe and Thorpe 1992.  That is a very dated reference, and there have been many others making the argument since 1992.  Pitts says "geology has never backed" the glacial transport case -- that is far from the truth.  "Archaeologists now agree" that the stone was taken from Stonehenge?  Really?  Pitts should have had the good grace to admit that he is referring to some geologists and some archaeologists.

Finally Pitts accepts, on the basis of the article by Clarke et al (2024) that the Altar Stone has been "shown" to have come from the far NE of Scotland.  He says:  "The most-travelled megalith at Stonehenge had finally been tracked to its source"........  In fact there are considerable doubts about the origins and provenancing of the samples purported to have come from the Altar Stone, no matter what the media coverage might have claimed.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-altar-stone-much-ado-about-nothing.html

Pitts really should be more careful, and so should the BBC.