Black kettles and even blacker pots

I was looking up something on Herbert Thomas the other day, and was reminded about these two articles by our good friends Ixer and Bevins:

"Carn Alw as a source of the rhyolitic component of the Stonehenge bluestones: a critical reappraisal of the petrographical account of H.H. Thomas".
Richard E. Bevins, Rob A. Ixer
Journal of Archaeological Science, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Apr 2013
doi:10.1016/j.jas.2013.03.017
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313001076


"Retracing the footsteps of H.H. Thomas: a review of his Stonehenge bluestone provenancing study".
Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer
Antiquity, May 2018.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.10
Published online: 31 May 2018

Quote:

At the time of undertaking his Stonehenge provenancing work (in the period 1920–
1923), Thomas was not actively undertaking fieldwork in the Mynydd Preseli area, and
had to rely predominantly on the set of samples he collected in 1906 (totalling 15
samples from the whole area between Rosebush and Crymych), on 13 samples in the
survey collection from Cunnington, and on the works and specimens of Parkinson and
Part. In essence, Thomas had an incomplete and unrepresentative set of samples from
the Mynydd Preseli, and a limited opportunity to study these rocks systematically in the
field.

Quote:
Our main conclusion is that the provenances for the bluestones as presented by Thomas
are not based on reliable evidence, but appear to have been influenced predominantly by
a set of samples collected during a single field excursion to the Mynydd Preseli in 1906,
14 years before his investigation of Stonehenge. He also had to rely on samples and thin
sections from other sources, which led to a bias in the sample available for comparison;
this was especially the case for Parkinson’s thin sections, which were predominantly
from the outcrop of Carn Alw, reflecting Parkinson’s interest in spherulitic rhyolites.
Hence, Thomas’s claims about the proposed sources of the Stonehenge bluestones are
unreliable.

Quote:
Our work also highlights how easy it is to accept published findings as ‘gospel’ without
challenge. This has been the case with Thomas’s paper for over 80 years.

This is wonderful stuff, coming from two geologists who have produced a flood of papers over the last decade, based on hardly any new fieldwork but on detailed analyses of rock fragments of uncertain provenance and dusty old thin sections from museum collections.  They criticise Thomas for depending on "an incomplete and unrepresentative set of samples",  for using unreliable evidence, for using samples from the debitage rather than from the monoliths themselves, and for relying on "samples and thin sections from other sources."   

They are clearly going after HHT -- and seeking to discredit him -- for failing to do proper fieldwork in which he could collect fully authenticated samples from named localities with accurate grid references..........  

This is hypocrisy of the highest order, and for the last decade or so I have been criticising the two geologists and assorted colleagues for basing pretty outrageous claims (about supposedly accurate bluestone provenancing) on extremely old and unreliable samples found in dusty shoeboxes and museum display cabinets.  Their sampling programmes have been hugely biased from the very beginning of their research.  The argument about the authenticity of Altar Stone samples (including infamous slide 277) has gone on for many years, as outlined on this blog, and is still unresolved.

But they do not seem to learn.  Here we go again, with the fiasco of the new Altar Stone provenancing work -- based on hardly any new field sampling and placing huge significance on two unauthenticated "Altar Stone" samples and two other bits of sandstone purchased from a rock shop in Whitby. That is a ludicrous state of affairs.  Because of the shortcomings of their sampling programme,  they have published two papers within a couple of weeks, with one showing results that are dramatically different from the other.  I am not a geologist, but I really do wonder what serious independent geologists make of this palaver.........  answers on a postcard please.

In an article today the "Independent" newspaper asks: "What does the latest study say on the Altar Stone?"  That's not the right question.  They should have asked "What does the latest study tell us about the geologists involved?"

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The Stonehenge Bluestone Debate - Glacial Transport & The Altar Stone

Here is the full video.   I imagine that very many of Coral and Jacky's followers will never have encountered any of this before......  some will no doubt be outraged by the lack of respect which I show towards our learned archaeological friends......

The big interview goes online

It would be nice to get something like this on mainstream TV, but that's probably too much to hope for.........  Anyway, just a month after the publication of the first video on the Stonehenge Bluestone Debate, Jacky and Coral have produced another one.  Episode 2 is about the glacial transport hypothesis and the Altar Stone controversy.  It's based largely on an interview I did with Jacky in our garden on 18th August.  It's virtually unedited, and runs for c 40 mins with a front end and a back end added on in the studio.

Here it is:

https://youtu.be/idbEst34aEw?si=vLuTlNkoPHaZRYbg

I hope you enjoy watching it.  Jacky and Coral have put a huge amount of work into it -- digging up a multitude of appropriate illustrations and even inventing some graphics of their own.  I may be biased, but I think they have done rather a good job and contributed something worthwhile to the public debate........

Bluestone science makes a huge advance, backwards

In some discussion about the bluestones generally and the Altar Stone in particular, on social media, somebody posted this the other day:  "What better way to get both your publication rate and citation rate up than to start arguing with yourself! Genius!"

I agree.  This is incredibly clever.  The bluestone geologists (we all know who they are) seem to have developed this brilliant new technique of writing a flood of papers, completely ignoring the published opinions of all who say anything inconvenient, and then writing more papers in which they disagree with themselves.

It happened with the "Neolithic" quarrying articles in the years following 2015, when they ignored two key peer-reviewed articles (written by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and myself) because we accepted hardly any of their extravagant claims.  They ignored other evidence published on Researchgate relating to Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  They were 100% focussed on shouting from the rooftops about "the Pompeii of Neolithic quarries" and about "monolith extraction on an industrial scale".  Since then they have rowed back significantly from those claims, and while they still claim to have discovered quarries they have had to accept that maybe one or two stones might have been moved from the sites about which they got so excited.  All the other stones at Stonehenge have probably, they now say,  come from other sites -- some of those not associated with Mynydd Preseli.  Needless to say, even that revised position is disputed. 

It happened in the Waun Mawn "Lost Circle" fiasco, in which they flagged up an amazing "discovery" backed up with state-of-the-science analytical techniques and then used high profile media promotion to sell it to the world.  The "learned" papers and ancillary popular articles are there for all to see.  Before going into print, they ignored the research findings and the opinions of others who know the territory far better than they do, and basked in the media glory while the going was good.  Then they ignored the criticisms of their papers, which included detailed scrutiny of their evidence.  Then they "discovered" in new articles that their previous findings were unreliable,  that none of the stones at Stonehenge had come from Waun Mawn, that the stones used in the "Lost Circle" were all locally derived, and that the Lost Circle never existed anyway. And so, they said, all things considered, there was no link of any sort between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge.  Big deal -- we all knew that anyway.

And now it has happened again. Shocking new research!!   Having said in a big paper in "Nature" journal that the Altar Stone had come from the Orcadian Basin and having implied that the prime "provenancing candidate" was Orkney, the geologists got massive global media coverage   -- which of course happens several times a year when somebody or other publishes something claimed to rewrite the text books and to "overturn the established Stonehenge narrative....."    You know the sort of thing.......  Well, blow me down, the ink on the Sun's banner headlines had hardly dried when along comes another paper written by, among others, the very same three geological musketeers, and saying that the Altar Stone had nothing whatsoever to do with Orkney..........

As I have noted before, this pantomime is portrayed (by those involved) as excellent science in which top experts assemble evidence, create hypotheses, test them and reject or replace them.  That's all very fine, but this is not excellent science at all -- it involves rushing into print with dramatic conclusions based on very scanty evidence, a refusal to acknowledge that the conclusions and even the evidence itself is hotly disputed, and an apparent determination to ignore all evidence that is inconvenient to the hypothesis being promoted.  The work involves biased sampling, failure to test field findings against control digs, assumptions dressed up as facts, and the ongoing use of ruling hypotheses.  I am not the only one who is less than impressed..........

Is this all deliberate?  Or can it really be the case that these guys do not have a clue what they are doing?

HH Thomas 1923 -- that infamous article is now accessible

Over and again I have picked up on complaints that the infamous 1923 article by HH Thomas -- on the subject of the Stonehenge bluestones -- has been impossible to find anywhere on the web.  It's more than 100 years old.  In some digitised collections in the USA the other volumes of the Antiquaries Journal are available, but not Volume 3.  All very strange.  As far as I can gather, Cambridge Journals  -- which took over responsibility for the old defunct journal -- has not digitised it either.  

So as a service to mankind, I have digitised my very old and battered version of the article as a "presentation"  -- and in no way claiming ownership or responsibility for the contents.

I hope that many people will read the article.  For all its failings, it is a very important contribution, and it's better that members of the public, and future researchers, read the full article and do not depend endlessly on what other people say about it!

Here is the link:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383778469_The_Source_of_the_Stones_of_Stonehenge_by_Herbert_Thomas_1923_scanned_version

Thunderous media silence on the latest Altar Stone story

 The Stones of Stenness

Isn't it interesting that with regard to the latest "discovery" that the Altar Stone could not have come from Orkney (Bevins et al, 30 August), there has not been any media coverage whatsoever?  No banner headlines, no TV news reports, no specially commissioned YouTube videos, no radio news items.........

We can also assume, therefore that there has been no press release accompanying the publication of the article.  Why not, I wonder?

The other extraordinary thing is the speed of publication. Received 23 July 2024, accepted 22 August 2024, available online 30 August 2024.  Barely a month passed between the submission of the article and its publication online. That means that there cannot possibly have been any peer review.  If there had been, it would have been acknowledged at the end of the paper.

So it was a hastily produced correction to the rather forceful suggestion (not a direct claim) that Orkney was the probable source of the Altar Stone in the "Nature" paper by Clarke et al, published just a couple of weeks earlier.

What a shambles.......

Orkney stakes its claim on the Altar Stone

 

It didn't take long for Orkney to claim the Altar Stone as one of its own, a sacred stone associated with an older, existing megalithic culture on Orkney, and then exported off down to the deep south as an item of great value and significance.  

Once you start a story rolling, it just gets bigger and bigger,  and to hell with what the science actually tells you.  Now where have we heard that before?

https://frontiersmagazine.org/stones-across-the-sea/

On 21st August The Scotsman developed the same fantasy to an extraordinary degree, with Dr Alison Sheridan (former principal curator of prehistory at National Museum of Scotland) weaving a wondrous take of cultural links between Orkney and Stonehenge -- all based on the assumption that everything in the paper by Clarke et al was factually correct.  Some people find it rather hard to differentiate between an opinion and a discovery.

https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/scottish-stone-at-stonehenge-may-have-been-diplomatic-gift-to-boost-sacredness-4749523

Truly, the gullibility of the predisposed knows no bounds.......  and there is no doubt that the intention of the work by Clarke et al was to demonstrate a cultural link between Orkney and Stonehenge.  The choice of the Cruaday Quarry sample as the "key to the Altar Stone mystery"was no accident......

PS.   These articles were published before the latest research which purports to show that the Altar Stone could NOT have come from Orkney...........

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PPS. Post modified and updated on 4 Sept 2024