On maul mythology

 

A lump of sarsen found at Stonehenge. Size unknown. Maul or hammerstone?  Are the scars caused by percussion damage?  Are they fresh, or old?  Could some of these scars have been present on the boulder or stone surface before it was collected and used in the stone settings?

On the matter of mauls, there is huge confusion relating to terminology.  Castleden refers to small mauls and large mauls used for rough dressing and hammerstones used for the finer work.  Cleal et al (1995) refer to 261 weighed sarsen 'mauls' at Stonehenge, all but 20 of which weighed less than 2 kg.  Others would refer to these as hammer stones.

As followers of this blog will know, I have voiced my doubts about the big Stonehenge mauls on many occasions on this blog.  Just use the search engine to find some of the relevant posts.....

Anyway, following the enquiry from an American friend the other day about maul dimensions and weights, and after looking at Phil Harding's recent paper in The Antiquaries Journal, I have done some digging and have discovered that much of what we read in the literature is very unreliable indeed.  Over and again we read that mauls in the 20 kg - 30 kg weight range were used systematically by the builders of Stonehenge to shape the large sarsen monoliths and even to shape mortice and tenon features. This is all based on what Willian Gowland said in 1902.  He claimed that very heavy mauls were used as tools for "pecking" purposes, as indicated by the physical condition of the stones themselves and by the traces left on the big monoliths.  Most of the so-called mauls were of course used as packing stones, and found in or near the sockets of the big uprights.

There is certainly surface "damage" on many of the stones described in the literature as mauls, but as far as I can ascertain, it is ALWAYS assumed that the damage has been done by human beings.  I would like to see some hard evidence in support of that contention.  Are the fracture scars always "fresh"?  Or could some of them -- or all of them -- have been present on the boulder surfaces prior to collection by human beings?  In other words, could we be looking at signs of glacial transport?

I don't know about you, but even when I was young and strong, I would have found it pretty well impossible to use stones heavier than bags of cement as "bashing tools" --- and that it would not have been any easier even if a mate or two had been helping me.  As Phil points out in his article, the term "maul" is a bit arbitrary anyway -- when is a hammer stone so big that it has to be referred to as a "maul"??  As he points out, some authorities prefer just to refer to "hammers" -- some quite small and some rather large and inconvenient.........

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/demystifying-sarsen-breaking-the-unbreakable/295466A7C6126D07D6987D7F042D603C

Quote:

Large sarsen mauls, which were up to 29kg in weight, were frequently formed from rounded quarzitic boulders that were obtained from gravel that is present in the coombes around Stonehenge. Gowland’s classification has been widely adopted,although Whitaker, in a comprehensive study focusing on the way in which they might have been selected and worked, has questioned the complex division, preferring to classify them collectively as hammers.

Quote:

Gowland proposed that monoliths might have been manufactured by percussion using massive mauls. When these were used in sequence, he suggested that the technique could be used to split large, naturally tabular blocks along a preconceived fracture line. This ‘sledgehammering’process could be improved by the prior use of fire to heat the stone. ........ Gowland’s model was endorsed by Atkinson, who, invoking techniques employed by sarsen workers and related quarrying industries, suggested that wedges might be used, replacing metal examples with wooden ones. This tenuous suggestion relied on conveniently located natural cracks in the sarsen to be successful. Its use remains entirely speculative, untested or confirmed in practice, and largely inappropriate for prehistoric sarsen shaping at Stonehenge. 

I think that the larger mauls -- maybe over 15 kg in weight -- were never used as tools, and that the "human" percussion marks displayed on many of them were made with smaller hammer stones to shape them or reduce their size so as to make convenient packing stones.  In other words, I do not believe the proposition that the big mauls were initially or primarily used as tools before being used secondarily as packing stones.

The myth of big mauls being used as tools has too easily been accepted, maybe because it reinforces the idea that the builders of Stonehenge were not just clever but also super-fit and superhuman -- and the idea of these powerfully built ancestors bashing away at the massive sarsens with huge unwieldy boulders is of course very handy if you are seeking to impress a busload of wide-eyed tourists on a tour of the ancient monument.........

I don't think our ancestors were that stupid. They knew all about expenditure of effort and cost-effectiveness.  When they built or partly built Stonehenge, they found lots o smallish sarsen boulders lying around, and they put these to good use as packing stones.  Some of them had to be reduced in size, and some were used as they were found, without any modification.  They were never used as tools.  

I have been checking up on the actual evidence in support of the "maul tool" hypothesis, and there is none.  It is all very circumstantial and speculative.  I have been having a protracted argument in AI mode on Google because it told me this: 

"Numerous practical, full-scale experiments and public demonstrations have been conducted. These have generally confirmed that the "pecking" method with heavy, handheld mauls or hammerstones is effective, though extremely time-consuming and laborious. This hands-on experience, involving archaeologists like Phil Harding and Julian Richards, has been influential in moving the consensus away from pure speculation to a practical understanding of the logistics involved."

When I challenged my AI friend on this, and said it was factually inaccurate, it had to admit eventually that there is no literature describing full-scale experiments and public demonstrations of the use of very heavy mauls for shaping big sarsens, and that it was simply seeking to justify "the consensus view."  

After much interesting and entertaining argumentation, this episode confirmed my view that while AI is useful in some circumstances, it would be better referred to as "artificial stupidity" because it is incapable of factoring in common sense, and always tries to please you by telling you the things you want to hear. It's essentially gullible, and does not seem to recognize a leading question for what it is.  It places undue emphasis on confirming the "establishment consensus".  It places undue trust in the weight or status of publications and in academic titles.  We have known all of that for some time now. 

Anyway, it was good to hear, on the R3 Today programme this very morning, the boss of Google and assorted other experts saying pretty well the same things as me.