Wednesday, 11 November 2026
Tuesday, 10 November 2026
The "Scottish Origin" of the Altar Stone: much mud on faces
The broken Altar Stone beneath sarsen stone 55b. Did any of the assumed Altar Stone
samples actually come from the recumbent monolith?
So here is the new paper we have been waiting for, introducing some common sense to the over-excited debate about the so-called "Scottish Origin" of the Altar Stone. Many thanks for Prof Andy Morton for sending me a copy.Details:
Searching for the origin of the Stonehenge Altar Stone: new sedimentological, petrographical, mineralogical, geochemical and isotopic constraints
Pirrie D et al, Journal of the Geological Society183 (2026) jgs2026-090, pp 1-19
https://doi.org/10.1144/jgs2026-090
Abstract:
Accurately constraining the provenance of geological materials from archaeological contexts is critical for the subsequent interpretation of their significance. Stonehenge, the iconic Neolithic monument on Salisbury Plain, is significant in terms of well-documented long-distance transport of geological materials used in its construction, with many of the bluestones transported c. 225 km from West Wales. One stone at Stonehenge, the Altar Stone, is distinctive in terms of its composition, being composed of a well-sorted fine- to very fine-grained calcite-cemented sandstone. Its purpose at the monument, and when it was transported to the site, is unknown. Early interpretations of a provenance from West Wales have previously been discounted based on both geochemical and mineralogical data. More recently, the age of detrital zircon, rutile and apatite grains in the Altar Stone were used to infer a provenance from the Orcadian Basin of NE Scotland. This paper presents a detailed multi-proxy characterization of the sedimentology, geochemistry, detrital and diagenetic mineralogy of the Altar Stone based on both in situ analysis along with the analysis of museum samples confidently attributed to the Altar Stone, as direct sampling is not possible. While the previously published detrital grain dating supports a Laurentian source for the heavy minerals present in the Altar Stone, the overall petrology, heavy mineral assemblage, clay mineralogy and geochemistry show that many outcrops of the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) in the Orcadian Basin could not have been the source of the Altar Stone. To date, no examined outcrop area of the UK ORS can be shown to have the same suite of lithological and geochemical characteristics as documented for the Altar Stone. Consequently, this integrated dataset shows that the exact provenance of the Altar Stone is as yet unknown.
This is a multi-authored work, including Bevins, Ixer, Pearce and Pirrie who were involved in the ill-advised and very premature 2024 suggestion -- heavily hyped in the media -- that the Altar Stone had probably come from the Orcadian Basin of NE Scotland. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07652-1 (They had also been involved in the "initial suggestion" that the Altar Stone had not come from Wales or the Welsh Borderlands, in The Journal of Archaeological Science in 1923.) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X23003905
Then there was a wider archaeological synthesis in December 2024. In "Stonehenge and its Altar Stone: the significance of distant stone sources" (Archaeology International, Vol. 27), Parker Pearson, Bevins, Bradley, Ixer, Pearce, and Richards used the 2024 Nature claim to argue that Stonehenge was built as a monument of island-wide Neolithic unification. Fanciful twaddle, but guaranteed to garner lots of attention in the mnedia.......
I said in a blog post on 4th September 2026: 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.
Prophecy fulfilled.
As readers of this blog will know, I heavily criticised these papers at the time they were published, in these and other posts.
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2026/09/stone-62-nice-academic-spat-about.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26004475?via%3Dihub
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-nature-article-where-was-publishing.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-stonehenge-narrative-becomes-even.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-stonehenge-narrative-becomes-even.html
My main concerns were, and still are, to do with the use of surrogate samples that might have come from the Altar Stone, or maybe not. I have also been concerned with the quality of the science used in support of some pretty outrageous claims -- with a small number of field samples (and more often samples cited in other studies) erroneously taken as representative of vast numbers of outcrops and vast swathes of territory.n The creating and analysis of aggregate samples is another issue.
I will look at this paper in another post -- and I do not accept for a moment the feeble excuse from Bevins, Ixer and Co that their previous deeply misleading and speculative publications were just part of a process of standard scientific elimination in a systematic search for the truth. Their approach is altogether too cavalier and too irresponsible. In their frantic search for media headlines and popular praise they keep on getting things hopelessly wrong, bringing science itself into disrepute.
It should be noted that the highly critical riposte of Ciborowsky and Nash (2026) -- which exposed a number of fatal flaws in the proxy Altar Stone data used by Bevins, Ixer et al -- was published too late to be incorporated and properly cited in the latest JGS article. We have certainly not heard the last of that particular spat -- but the message from Ciborowski and Nash is essentially the same as that of the new article -- namely that the database is simply too flimsy to demonstrate any link between the Altar Stone and Scotland.
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2026/09/stone-62-nice-academic-spat-about.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26004475?via%3Dihub
One last point. The eight "Altar Stone" samples that are analysed in this new study are all accepted by the authors as having correct attributions. However, anybody looking at the data plots on diagrams such as that of Figure 4 must surely ask the same question as the one occurring to me -- "Surely there are such wide variations in these plots that the samples cannot possibly all have come from the same stone?" The authors declare that they have a "high degree of confidence" that all attributions are correct, and they explain wide internal variations as resulting from patchy baryte cement distribution across parts of the Altar Stone surface, surface weathering variations, and heavy minerals located at different concentrations in discontinuous laminations. All too convenient, with circular reasoning and special pleading never far away.........
Watch this space.......
Sunday afternoon at Rhosygilwen, 15th November
