The "no erratics" mantra is disingenuous and unscientific

One of the Berwick St James bluestone erratics -- limestone, but no less respectable and interesting

than the Stonehenge bluestones

 "There are no erratics on Salisbury Plain, and therefore the glacial transport theory can be dismissed."  How many times have we read that, or something very like it, in archaeological tomes and "learned" articles?  Too many times to count.  Well, it is high time to call this out as utter tosh, and to insist that the people who think of themselves as Stonehenge experts started to demonstrate greater integrity in their work.

This is a typical statement from Ixer, Bevins and Pollard:  "The finding of five samples of Stonehenge debitage, one in a secure Neolithic context, supports the suggestion that all were brought to Silbury in prehistoric times and can no longer be dismissed as extraneous."  What on earth does that mean?  That because one sample is in a "secure Neolithic context" they can assume that the others are equally secure or relevant?  And that those that do not have secure archaeological contexts can be "dismissed" as having no relevance at all?  That is patently absurd --  the fragments might have huge significance for the debate surrounding bluestone transport.  And on what grounds do they refer to the fragments as "Stonehenge debitage"?  That is completely unscientific.

Over and again, in the literature, inconvenient bluestone fragments are dismissed as "adventitious" on the basis that somebody or other, in historic times, might have carried them in from somewhere else and dropped them or thrown them out into the landscape.  They might even have carried them into an excavation site and left them there, buried in "debitage"...........

Following on from a comment by Tony the other day, let's look at the word "adventitious".  It means "accidental" or  "coming from an outside source and not being an essential part of the context".  Another definition: "appearing in other than the usual or normal place."  In other words, something eccentric or erratic.  So there we are then -- an "adventitious find" of a foreign stone (of any size) is an erratic erratic.

Here are a few more definitions:  unexpected, unplanned, untimely, inconceivable, inadvertent, unwelcome.  So there are value judgments in there as well -- the sense, very often when the word is used, is that it would make the finder's life very much simpler if the "adventitious find" had not been found at all!  There we come to the crux of the matter.  Large or small finds of bluestones on Salisbury Plain, in places where they should not exist (according to your belief system) should be dealt with by dismissing them or dominishing their possible importance.  Confirmation bias rules the day, as it has done at Stonehenge for decades, as the establishment narrative is repeated or elaborated over and again, ad infinitum.

An erratic stone, as I have often tried to explain very patriently, is a stone (of any size) that is found in a location remote from its place of origin. On that basis I am not entirely sure that the sarsen monoliths and smaller sarsen stones at Stonehenge are erratics at all -- since they may simply have been "let down"  from a pre-existing sediment cover that has otherwise been eroded away.  We'll leave the sarsens tom one side for now.  

As for the other erratics, there are countless examples all over Salisbury Plain and the chalk downs.  That is not disputed by anybody.  The Berwick St James limestone monoliths are erratics.  The Stonehenge bluestone monoliths are erratics.  The Newall Boulder and the Meaden Cobble are erratics.  The Boles Barrow bluestone is an erratic.   The bluestone fragments found in the Cursus are erratics. The spotted dolerite stone found near Lake is an erratic.  The oolitic limestone "filler stones" at West Kennet are erratics.  The Stonehenge non-sarsen packing stones are erratics.  The West Kennet grus comes from at least one granidiorite erratic.  And so on.  And so on.

Another point needs to be made.  Traditionally the members of the Stonehenge establishment have pretended that there is a difference between the bluestones and the non-bluestones.  According to their definition, the bluestones have all come from West Wales, and recently Ixer and Bevins have muddied the waters further by promoting the idea that the Altar Stone is not a bluestone because it might have come from Scotland.  Similarly, the abundant sandstone and limestone clasts on Salisbury Plain that have come from sedimentary outcrops on the fringes of the chalk outcrop are quietly forgotten about on the basis that they are not bluestones and because they have clearly been carried in by human beings.   Sorry, but the circular reasoning is all too apparent...........  And it is somewhat intriguing that the majority of them seem to have come from the west and south-west -- just as we might expect if ice was involved in their transport.

So it is perfectly feasible that many if not all of the limestone and sandstone fragments and larger clasts that occur on Salisbury Plain, and which have apparently come from sites within twenty or thirty miles, have been entrained and transported by glacier ice.  At any rate, I propose that all of these non-sarsen stones should be referred to as "bluestones".  That would make life much simpler for everybody.

EVERY exotic stone on Salisbury Plain and on the adjacent downs is of great potential significance, and MUST be accepted as an erratic.  It's high time that the archaeologists and geologists who express their views about prehistoric events started to show some honesty and responsibility in this matter.  

Once the erratics are accepted and labelled for what they are, and are all accepted as bluestones, we can move on and discuss, in an unbiased fashion, how they might have travelled from their assorted places of origin, both near and far.