I have written about the curse of the secure archaeological context in the past, but was reminded of it the other day by a comment from Terence Meaden. Terence says that he has, over the years, sought to bring to the attention of a well-known archaeologist certain finds of suspected bluestone erratics and fragments in the Stonehenge landscape -- turned up occasionally in molehills. He says that she would not take them seriously because they were "not from secure archaeological contexts."
I wonder how many hundreds or thousands of bluestone finds in the past -- on Salisbury Plain and on the chalk downs -- have been dismissed by archaeologists on the same pretext, thus going unrecorded and unrecognized? I have encountered this attitude myself, on this blog, by some contributors who dismiss certain inconvenient bluestone finds as being "adventitious" -- the assumption being that they were brought into the landscape as hardcore for road building projects or as blocks for dwellings and stone walls. This of course introduces a powerful bias into Stonehenge studies -- which is further enhanced by the tendency in certain quarters to recognize some stones as bluestones (if they are made of the materials used in the stone settings) or as non-bluestones (if they are made of anything else).
Of course there are some stones in the landscape that are adventitious or "intruduced" in the sense that they have been carried in for construction porojects and can be shown to have nothing to do with either natural processes or the building of prehistoric monuments. Strips of land alongside roadways or railway lines, or land used for housing or other modern purposes, should of course be examined very carefully, and cobbles, boulders and small broken rock fragments that are turned up should not be accepted as genuine erratics without careful consideration.
But to dismiss ALL erratic finds as irrelevant simply because they cannot be tied into a known archaeological feature is intellectually very lazy indeed. In geomorphology EVERY erratic found in the Stonehenge landscape is of great potential importance, and every one should have been recorded in the past and examined in the context of the competing stone transport theories.
Anyway, next time somebody tells you that there are no bluestone erratics on Salisbury Plain, just remind them that they do indeed exist, and that only a very few of them have actually been recorded as a result of this consistent and long-standing research bias.
If you are seeking to answer this question "Was SalisburyPlain ever glaciated?" archaeology is essentially irrelevant. Pedology, geology and geomorphology, on the other hand, become very relevant indeed.
Quote from my Stonehenge Bluestones book:
The Jurassic Limestone blocks in Berwick St James are also “inconvenient” in the same sense. Richard Thorpe and his colleagues assembled information in 1991 relating to other intriguing stone finds: for example, a piece of rhyolite found near Avebury, a spotted dolerite stone from near Lake, a piece of rhyolite from a very early Neolithic pit fill on King Barrow Ridge (associated with pre-grooved pottery fragments and probably more than 4500 years old), and fragments of quartz diorite, hornblende diorite and granidiorite in the long barrow numbered Amesbury 39. There are also assemblages of foreign stones at Windmill Hill. Maskelyne and Judd were also quite certain of the presence of sedimentary rock fragments including greywackes, flagstones and shales, and metamorphic rocks including slates -- all discovered in the spoil from archaeological digs. Dolerites (spotted and unspotted), rhyolites and sandstones “of the Altar Stone type” were also recorded by Cunnington, Colt Hoare and other early workers, and by archaeologists including Julian Richards in more recent times. At least twenty “bluestones” have been listed by the Wessex Archaeological Trust in the Stonehenge environs but outside the monument itself. There are thousands of bluestone fragments in the old collections and in the sediments within the Aubrey Holes.
The recent excavations at Durrington Walls, Windmill Hill and the Cursus have been particularly revealing, throwing up bits of bluestone with alarming frequency. Many of these occurrences have been listed on Stonehenge blog sites and on other segments of Stonehenge cyberspace -- and while some fragments have undoubtedly been misidentified and while others may truly be “adventitious”, many of them have come from meaningful archaeological contexts. For example, bluestone fragments from the Cursus are now being found and identified. Rob Ixer has identified some of JF Stone’s 1947 finds from the Cursus and Fargo Wood as “acid volcanics and tuffs” and also spotted dolerite. Some seemed to be calcareous ashes. In 2008 a further “bluestone” from the fill of the Cursus pit was identified as identical to one of the sandstone stumps in the Stonehenge bluestone circle. That is potentially very significant, since it means the lump of (Ordovician?) sandstone was present before 5,200 BP in this very early earthwork. Just like the Boles Barrow spotted dolerite boulder, that is very inconvenient indeed if you happen to subscribe to the human transport theory, but not at all inconvenient if you happen to think that the bluestones on Salisbury Plain are glacial erratics……….
And in addition to these recorded finds there are the rumours. One rumour was that Richard Atkinson found a lump of bluestone on Silbury Hill when he was working there. The find is unrecorded in the published literature, and attempts to verify it through English Heritage in 2008 got nowhere. But suddenly it has appeared in the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury, with a note that it was found in 1970. It would be natural enough for Atkinson to be considerably embarrassed by such a find, since it would have been wildly out of context according to his view of the Neolithic world. But when one digs into the literature, one finds that at least 1300 bluestone fragments are reputed to have been found on or inside the hill! Have they all been misidentified? That’s very unlikely. ...............
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