The myth of the Newgrange "white quartz facade"

 

I was intrigued to see, in the latest "distant stone sources" paper from MPP and his merry gang, that the source of the quartz used in the facade of Newgrange was claimed to be around 80 km away, to the south.  See Fig 1 in the article, and text page 114.  As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence to support this contention. Cooney (2000) and Stout (2002) are cited as references, but I am not aware of any geological research that might confirm that the quartz cobbles and blocks were taken from the Wicklow Mountains (near Glendalough).  That piece of the myth is repeated over and again in social media.

It's true that there is abundant white quartz associated with old mine workings at Glendalough,  but this does not mean that there was a Neolithic quarry there, or that this was a source for the quartz used at Newgrange!  It is disingenuous of MPP et al to pretend that this is a "known provenance" -- quartz veins (some thick, some thin) are ubiquitous across the landscape, and it is notoriously difficult to provenance any given lump of quartz unless it has some truly unique characteristics.   There is simply no reason to doubt that if (and this is a big "if") quartz blocks really were collected up and used at Newgrange for ornamental or "architectural" purposes, they were simply picked up across the landscape in the vicinity of the monument. Indeed, there are old records of abundant "water-worn" quartz cobbles and small boulders found at the site during excavation, and this ties in with the belief that much of the raw material for the old monument (as distinct fromn the reconstructed one) came from the nearby river terraces of the River Boyne. It's difficult to conclude anything from quartz stone shapes, but many of them are sub-rounded or sub-angular, and this would be consistent with sources in glacial and fluvioglacial deposits in the neighbourhood.

But a study of "facade stone shapes" would probably be very unreliable, because it is clear that many tonnes of quartz blocks and cobbles were sifted out from piles of excavation debris by O'Kelly and his "reconstruction team" between 1962 and 1975. The non-quartz material was dumped back to act as the fill as the mound was rebuilt. (This para has been corrected.  Thanks to Tim Daw for pointing out that no material was imported to the site by O'Kelly and his rather imaginative team.  He also provided a couple of additional references, listed below.)

Anyway, all things considered, this is yet another example of mythology being presented as fact............  

Parker Pearson, M., Bevins, R., Bradley, R., Ixer, R., Pearce, N. and Richards, C. ‘Stonehenge and its Altar Stone: the significance of distant stone sources’. Archaeology International, 2024, 27 (1), pp. 113–37 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/AI.27.1.13

This is interesting:

https://aliisaac.substack.com/p/controversy-at-newgrange

Yet more:

Notes on Some Non-Local Cobbles at the Entrances to the Passage-Graves at Newgrange and Knowth, County Meath.   Frank Mitchell in : The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, Vol. 122 (1992), pp. 128-145 (18 pages) 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25509025

Meighan, Hartwell, Kennan and Simpson, Sourcing the rocks on Newgrange's facade: granites from the north and quartz from the south. IQUA, April 2002, NS 28, pp 4-5.
http://iqua.ie/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Newsletter-NS-No-28_grey.pdf

These articles are both rather complacent, and neither tests the hypothesis that the quartz pebbles and cobbles are locally derived from local quartz outcrops and glacial and fluvioglavcial deposits within the Boyne Valley.  There is an inbuilt assumption that because the Neolithic structures under scrutiny were "important" or "spectacular", the stones used in their construction must have been BROUGHT from somewhere else............