If the builders of Stonehenge wanted stones from everywhere in order to cement a "unification project", why have the stones all come from one narrow compass direction??
Parker Pearson, M., Bevins, R., Bradley, R., Ixer, R., Pearce, N. & Richards, C., (2024) “Stonehenge and its Altar Stone: the significance of distant stone sources”, Archaeology International 27(1), 113–137.
doi: https://doi.org/10.14324/AI.27.1.13
The team, with or without one or two of its members, spends most of its time arguing that the 80 or so bluestones at Stonehenge were so highly revered and sacred that they were quarried from specific locations and built into sacred stone circles in West Wales before being transported overland from Preseli to Stonehenge as acts of tribute. The stones were very special indeed, and Ixer and Bevins still spend much of their time arguing that the very small number of stone sources emphasises their value. (I disagree with that, citing their own studies of individual lithologies which always seem to demonstrate that there are geochemical and petrological outliers and "odd stone fragments" in the collections that demonstrate MULTIPLE stone sources.)
And yet, here we have an article which argues that the objective of the builders of Stonehenge was to obtain orthostats from as many different locations as possible, from as far away as possible, as part of a policical programme of unification. In other words, multiple stone sources were all the rage, from as many different locations as possible -- which suggests that there was not much concern about the sacredness or the status of the quarrying sites from which the stones were taken. (Yes, they still want their quarries........)
To make matters more confusing, they don't want the Altar Stone to be called a bluestone at all, because they think it does not come from the right part of the British Isles.
Now, in the latest papers, Ixer and Bevins are back to arguing for a very small number of provenances, ignoring the fact that the majority of the "orthostats" have shapes suggesting that they were not extracted from the living rock but were simply picked up from the ground surface.
Back to MPP et al, 2024. From the conclusion:
This conclusion will no doubt be questioned in the specialist literature before long, but it does not withstand any sort of scrutiny. The main problem is that the cluster of bluestones has not come from all over Britain, from all points of the compass, but simply from West Wales. The stones have been moved broadly from north-west to south-east. And that happens to be exactly the direction of known ice flow involving the Irish Sea Ice Stream during two or more glacial episodes.
Where are the "extraordinary and alien rocks" from North Wales or from the Midlands? Where are the exotic rocks from Eastern England, or from the South coast? Or from Devon and Cornwall?
The bluestones at Stonehenge have to be glacial erratics. Why on earth are we still arguing about this?
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