Another attack on the Altar Stone's "Scottish origin"

As we know from a vast media campaign and from abundant posts on this blog, the idea that the Stonehenge Altar Stone (stone 80) came from "Orcadian" NE Scotland is now taken as an accepted truth.  There have been some differences in interpretation from the Bevins - Ixer - Pearce team and the Clarke and Kirkland team, but their papers make some pretty brash claims which have never been properly interrogated in the specialist literature.  Well, all that is changing, and with a number of geologists now working on the case, I predict that the whole edifice of the "Scottish Altar Stone" will soon come crashing down. 

Key publications:

A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. 2024. Anthony J. I. Clarke, Christopher L. Kirkland, Richard E. Bevins, Nick J. G. Pearce, Stijn Glorie & Rob A. Ixer. Nature 632, 15 Aug 2024, pp 570-587.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07652-1

Was the Stonehenge Altar Stone from Orkney? Investigating the mineralogy and geochemistry of Orcadian Old Red sandstones and Neolithic circle monuments. 2024. Bevins, R., Pearce, N., Hillier, S., Pirrie, D., Ixer, R. A., Andò, S., Barbarano, M., Power, M. R., & Turner, P. (2024). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 58, Article 104738. A
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2024.104738

Clarke, A. J. I., Veness, R. L. J., Kirkland, C. L., Clark, C. D., Gandy, N., Emery, A. et al. (2026) From Highlands to Henge: Refining the Provenance and Transport Pathways of Stonehenge's Altar Stone. Journal of Quaternary Science, 1–8.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jqs.70080

I have expressed my grave concerns about the methods employed by the two teams (working separately or jointly) and about the reliability of their analytical results, and these concerns are reinforced by new work by Ciborowski and Nash.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.106012

Hidden in the depths of a highly technical analysis of geochemical methods of stone provenancing, there are two short sections (5.5c and 5.5d) which are of direct relevance.

Just a reminder:  I have heavily criticised the sampling procedures used by the above research teams, who have used proxies or surrogate samples both for the Altar Stone and for the ORS rocks of the Ordcadian Basin. The Altar Stone samples come from old museum collections of rock fragments that may or may not have actually come from the Altar Stone, and the ORS bedrock samples were bought from a rock shop in Whitby.  Nobody initially did any fieldwork.  Quite extraordinary.

I have also criticised the use of just as few analysed samples as proxies for the vast area of the Orcadian Basin, most of which is of course unsampled and unknown. I have many other criticisms too, which can be checked out by putting "Altar Stone" or " Clarke" into the blog search box.

Back to the present day.  Ciborowski and Nash (in their latest contribution, just a few days old) express concerns about "ambiguities" in the use of bivariate geochemical plots by Bevins et al.  (That is a coded way of saying that there are strong suspicions of bias.) They are particularly concerned about the aggregation of samples by those who are promoting the Orcadian connection.   They claim that "pooling" or aggregating data from multiple disparate samples across an entire region to create a generalized "average" or "mean" signature is fundamentally unscientific. They show that when researchers use an aggregated average to characterize a target source area, they erase the localized, internal variations of the actual geology.  By smoothing out the data mathematically, you can inadvertently force a statistical match that doesn't exist anywhere  in reality.  The claimed statistical link between A and B  is an artifact of the analytical method, not an expression of a geological match.

Quote: When the U-Pb zircon signatures of the individual ‘Altar Stone’ samples are compared to those of the individual ‘Orcadian Basin’ samples, any meaningful similarity between the two groups disappears. Indeed, the more valid conclusion that may be drawn from the U-Pb zircon data in Clarke et al. (2024) is that, even with five comparator analyses, none of the individual ‘Altar Stone’ samples look anything like the Orcadian Basin in terms of U-Pb zircon geochronology. This observation alone suggests that the Altar Stone is not from northeast Scotland.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26004475?via%3Dihub

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Looking in on this spat from the outside, this seems to me like a pretty fundamental attack on the analytical methods employed by those who are promoting the "Scottish Altar Stone" hypothesis.  And various little birds have told me that there is more to come......