Monolith extraction pits at Stonehenge?

The honeycomb chalk debris surface.  I have seen no convincing evidence that demonstrates that these pits and hollows (or at least some of them) are not genuine stone extraction pits.

There has been some discussion lately, on social media, on the possible occurrence of one or more deep pits at Stonehenge, in amongst the stone settings -- indicative of the extraction of use of large stones.  This is not a new idea -- indeed, I had a discussion with Nick Snashall about this some years ago.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2016/08/extraction-pits-solution-hollows-post.html

In that discussion, I was not at all convinced by the argument that genuine extraction pits are genuinely different in kind (ie in morphological features) to other pits that are man-made either as sockets or to accommodate packing stones etc...........

See  also:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2013/08/where-did-stonehenge-sarsens-come-from.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/03/stonehenge-always-was-bit-of-mess.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/were-some-stonehenge-sarsens.html

The honeycomb characteristics of the chalky ground surface beneath the Stonehenge layer and other accumulations of detritus have always suggested to me that at least some of the surface indentations and elongated hollows might mark the places from which noth sarsens and bluestones have been extracted and rearranged.  There is the matter of the "stone 16 pit"......... or a pit that might have held stone 56......

In other words, there is a strong possibility that Stonehenge was simply built where it is because that is where the stones (or the bulk of them) were found...........

Some recent discussion has centred on a large "mystery pit" at the centre of Stonehenge, which has shown up in various excavations. Prof MPP thinks it is very intriguing, but Tim Daw thinks it is a genuine extraction pit, used for taking away the Lake House meteorite, which he speculates was found here. I'm not sure what the basis for that speculation might be.  But why could the pit not have been an extraction pit once occupied by one of the larger sarsens or even by one or more bluestones?

To quote Mike Pitts in "Digging Deeper":

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/04/pitts-and-very-ancient-sarsens.html

The idea is that there are two great pits at Stonehenge, larger than any other and both difficult to explain. One of these I partly excavated in 1979, where we found the impression of a standing stone on the bottom, and Atkinson excavated part of it in 1956 (thinking at the time it was the erection ramp for the Heelstone).

The other is near the centre of Stonehenge. It was written about by Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues in Antiquity 2007, as part of their study of the site’s phasing. It’s a problematic thing, as Parker Pearson argues, excavated partly by Gowland in 1901 and partly by Atkinson on two occasions, in 1956 and 1958. There are two radiocarbon dates from samples that appear to be from the pit, but context details are missing and we can’t be sure exactly where they came from, and whether or not they were in pits dug into the filled larger pit; I don’t think we can trust these to age the big pit, which like that by the Heelstone, remains undated.

Both of these could be explained as filled natural hollows that once contained larger local sarsens. To the north-east, we may be looking at the stone that was dug out and raised, the Heelstone. To the south-west, we can only guess. It’s such a large pit, it might have held the tallest stone, trilithon Stone 56 which now stands at the end of the pit. I suggested Stone 16 as a possible candidate, because of its odd shape.