I have been doing more research on the origins of the human transport hypothesis (I won't call it a theory today, since it is not supported by enough evidence) and have discovered a delicious irony.
The inventor of the human transport idea was of course geologist Herbert Thomas, around 1918-1921 -- formulating his ideas in the years after the end of the Great War. Anyway, in 1921—just three years after the armistice -- Thomas wrote his famous paper tracing the bluestones to the Preseli Hills. At that moment in history, British archaeology was deeply entangled with national identity. The devastating loss of life in the Great War left a fractured national psyche that desperately needed a narrative of ancient British exceptionalism, organization, and cultural supremacy to counter the dominant German archaeological schools of the era and the exciting Neolithic discoveries made in Germany.
To restore national pride, British academic institutions desperately sought narratives of ancient domestic superiority. Emphasizing that British Neolithic tribes possessed great enough intelligence, social cohesion, and engineering genius to manually haul multi-tonne monoliths across hundreds of miles of wilderness served as a powerful cultural balm. It explicitly positioned ancient British society as far more "civilized" and sophisticated than its continental German contemporaries. I have dealt with this issue before on this blog, with thanks to Stephen Briggs and David Keys of the Independent newspaper:
In don't for moment believe that Thomas was an independent and objective scientist simply reporting on his findings and drawing sensible conclusions from his evidence. He knew exactly what he was doing.
This is what I have said earler about Thomas's deliberate distortion /manipulation of the evidence of glaciation:
All things considered, the accumulated evidence shows that by 1910 the broad outlines of glaciation in the Bristol Channel / Celtic Sea arena were already established, involving thick and active ice carrying erratics and other glacial materials from the NW across Pembrokeshire and up the Bristol Channel, affecting the coasts of South Wales and the South-West Peninsula. In making his claims about the impossibility of bluestone transport towards Stonehenge HH Thomas wilfully ignored a great amount of evidence in the printed literature, and wilfully misrepresented the opinions of senior "glacialists". It is quite extraordinary that he got away with it -- but that, maybe, was because he was a geologist talking to archaeologists or antiquarians. If he had been a geologist talking to other geologists, he would certainly not have got away with it. They would have had his guts for garters.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313001076
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.10
Hünenbett on Riesenberg, near Nobbin, North Germany
Anyway, leaving aside Thomas's professionalism and his integrity, he has had pretty much a free ride from the academic community, since most archaeologists and even most geologists seem to have accepted the reliability of what he had to say. The narrative that he outlined was warmly accepted and then eagerly developed by the likes of Atkinson, Wainwright and Parker Pearson -- and even initially by other geologists.
Now, more than a hundred years later, we come full circle. We now know that Salisbury Plain behaves identically to continental equivalents over deep time, where older glacial tills on Cretaceous chalk undergo geomorphological erasure through chemical weathering and periglacial activity. This absence of coherent till reflects the defining characteristics of parts of the North European Old Drift Landscape (Altmoränenlandschaft) created in the Anglian glaciation but unaffected by later ice incursions.
Nobbin megalithic tomb, North Germany
A century later, standard European geomorphology reveals that German and Danish contemporaneous tribes were simply harvesting natural, large glacial lag erratics left on chalk downlands subject to quite rapid surface lowering. They had no need to go hunting for rock outcrops or to open monolith quarries. They used erratic boulders more or less where found, to create structures thet were sometimes quite complex. By defending the human transport model as an immutable truth, modern orthodoxy is not defending robust field data; it is inadvertently protecting a piece of post-WWI anti-German political propaganda from 1921.
It will be a beautifiul irony if a deepeer understanding of megalithic structures made of glacial erratics on a chalk bedrock base in Northern Germany demonstrates once and for all that the Stonehenge "human transport" scenario is altogether unnecessary, and that the promotion of a wildly fanciful bluestone narrative by HH Thomas and his successors has been a complete waste of time.
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See also:
on the perceived value or significance of glacial erratics.
