What a delicious irony............

The bluestones -- geologically selected, or geologically diverse?

Anybody who reads my blog -- or who just dips in now and then to find out what's occurin' -- will know that for the last 15 years I have been making the point that the Stonehenge bluestones have come from multiple sources.  When one counts the bluestone debris in the "debitage" it seems that there are around 46 known rock types involved.  Clearly there is discussion about what constitutes a rock "type" and where the boundary lies between one "type" and another, given that geologists can be classified either as lumpers or splitters.  Anyhow, you get the message -- there are lots of different bluestone lithologies and hence lots of different provenances.

"Oh no," said geologists Ixer and Bevins many moons ago.  "There are very few bluestone types, specially selected and quarried from specific sacred locations which we have identified."  And so we had Craig Rhosyfelin flagged up as the "Pompeii of Neolithic Quarries" and references to bluestone monolith extraction "on an industrial scale" from the tor of Carn Goedog.

This was of course the Orthodoxy to which all true believers were expected to submit, as part of the belief system preached by the Prophet Michael. He even referred to the ".......extraordinary appearance of the quarries". At both Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog, he said, "the outcrops are striking and impressive, with their naturally upright pillars making these places anomalous and remarkable when encountered."  That is simply wishful thinking.  I know both sites rather well, and they are not characterised by "upright pillars".  And they are no more striking than scores of other rocky outcrops in the Preseli district.

Then it all started to crumble away,  with a recognition that there were no identified uses of Rhosyfelin foliated rhyolite monoliths in Pembrokeshire or anywhere else, and the realisation that the spotted dolerite monoliths at Stonehenge were quite diverse, and had actually come from many different places.  So in the view of the independent observer the quarries became redundant, as did the Waun Mawn "lost bluestone circle" promoted so heavily and cynically by Prof MPP on the telly and in print.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379121966_The_Stonehenge_bluestones_did_not_come_from_Waun_Mawn_in_West_Wales

But now, in the latest blockbuster article which purports to transform our understanding of Stonehenge, we find that MPP and his merry gang, on the basis of no new evidence, claim that the Stonehenge monoliths have come from multiple sources all over the place.  They call it "composite monumentality".  Stones were carried as tributes or symbols of unification from points all over the British Isles to Stonehenge, which is seen as the great cultural, religious and political focal point of England, Wales and Scotland.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-stonehenge-narrative-becomes-even.html

So now they just love the idea of the bluestones coming from multiple provenances and being made of many different rock types.  The more the merrier, seems to be the mantra, since a Stonehenge monument attracting bluestones from 46 (or whatever) different West Wales locations must have been a much more powerful place than a little monument somewhere else attracting stones from just a few places in the neighbourhood.

There is a delicious irony in all of this.  First, according to Bevins and Ixer, the bluestones were not geologically diverse.  And now they are.  You couldn't make it up............