THE BOOK
Some of the ideas discussed in this blog are published in my new book called "The Stonehenge Bluestones" -- available by post and through good bookshops everywhere. Bad bookshops might not have it....
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Monday 18 March 2024

Bluestone "biface" stones at Stonehenge?

Above the Durrington"biface" bluestone
Below -- large lumps of sarsen

I am intrigued by this mention of other biface bluestones found at Stonehenge.   This is news to me......... The authors assume they are artifacts and that they were brought to the site.  Is there any evidence at all in support of that contention?

Source:
Along Prehistoric Lines: Neolithic, Iron Age and Romano-British Activity in the Former MOD Headquarters, Durrington, Wiltshire
By Steve Thompson and Andrew B. Powell
Published by Wessex Archaeology, 2018

https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/mod-durrington

Quote:

"Several finds have been uncovered alongside many artefacts such as ceramic and worked flint typical of the period. The most impressive, at least in size where the pieces of worked sarsen stone blocks found in the posthole alignment, the largest weighing in at 15 kg, with two smaller fragments, interpreted as broken flakes, being found alongside it.

The use of sarsen as a material to construct stone circles such as Stonehenge and Avebury may suggest this material had some importance to the occupants of Neolithic Durrington, however it is suggested that the stone was discarded after being unable to be worked further. It is also broadly contemporary with the sarsen phase of Stonehenge, however it is possible sarsen was more commonplace than it is today as a number of solitary standing stones are known locally.

A piece of worked ‘bluestone’ known as a biface was found in a later ditch close to the intersection of the two posthole alignments. This object is similar to ones found at Stonehenge and is almost certainly of Neolithic date. However, whilst it is likely to have been brought to the site at this time, it could equally be a Romano-British curio or trophy. ‘Bluestone’ is a key material of non-local rocks, many of which were brought from Wales, and most famous for its use at Stonehenge and the ritual activity taking place there."

Sunday 17 March 2024

Marginal channels near Carn Goedog

 


This is another amazing drone image courtesy Hugh Thomas of Preseli360. With a low light level and deep shadows, the amount of detail showing up in the landscape is extraordinary.  Some of these tracks may be man-made -- or made by the feet of thousands of animals in the days of the drovers -- but I am more than ever convinced that the majority are related to marginal meltwater flow along the edge of an ice mass occupying the Brynberian Moor lowlands and pressing against the Mynydd Preseli north face.  You can see Carn Goedog in the middle distance.

I have been meaning to survey these channels properly, but have never got round to it.  The gradients and micro-morphology could be important.  One of those things still on the list.........

Elephant Foot Glacier

 


There's a lot of debate on social media about whether this photo is real -- surely it is too perfect to be true? When I first encountered it, there was no location, but I have tracked it down to Romer Lake, in the far north of Greenland. The piedmont glacier itself is called Elephant Foot Glacier -- and you can see why. It's the perfect illustration of a solid flowing like a liquid.......  it's located on the shore of a lake which is frozen solid for most of the year -- and this may explain why erosional processes and calving have not greatly affected the glacier snout.

Anyway, the above photo has clearly been doctored, because everything is too smooth for comfort -- but the main distortion occurs because the image width has been compressed, giving the distant mountain slopes an exaggerated steepness. So the piedmont glacier is really a bit wider than it appears.




Images from Google Earth


 

Periglacial Carningli

 


Thanks to Hugh Thomas and his Preseli360 site for this great drone image -- showing the south-facing flank of Carningli, with the rock outcrops of dolerite almost entirely obliterated by great accumulations of scree.  This is intriguing, since scree accumulations generally (in the northern hemisphere) accumulate on the shady or north-facing sides of mountains. Here the shady side has a gentler gradient, and there are abundant bedrock exposures showing significant ice moulding features.  So my explanation is that there was probably a substantial windscoop feature here at a time when the summit of the mountain was a nunatak.  The relatively warm summer rock surfaces might have helped to keep the windscoop open, but long winters (with freeze-thaw processes dominant) would have allowed substantial rockface disintigtration and scree accumulation.

Friday 15 March 2024

Post Processualism and ArchaeoMythology



One of the themes of my talk the other evening was the manner in which evidence has been devalued in archaeology, at least by those practitioners who have embraced this strange thing called Post Processualism. Those who see themselves as "post processualists" have a license to say that evidence and facts have some value, but not much -- and that creating a coherent and exciting narrative that explains features on the ground is a far more worthy (ie academically respectable) exercise. In order to create the narrative you must understand the people you are dealing with, even if they lived many thousands of years ago. So you use imagination and empathy to get inside their minds and understand their motivations, their beliefs and their behaviour. In passing on your discoveries to others, you then tell the story, and bolt onto it any evidence that might give it extra colour or strength. The story becomes, in effect, the working hypothesis, to be modified as often as you like, with material added from your fieldwork or your archaeological digs, until it ends up as confirmed in your own mind.  On effect, you then have a ruling hypothesis. It's a rather relaxed procedure, fairly familiar to people working in the humanities, where you don't need a huge amount of raw data or academic rigour.   After all, everything is subjective, and your story is not necessarily any more or less accurate or truthful than mine.  Understanding and insight become more important than processes and facts.........

That's all very well for those of you who are communicating with colleagues or students who are just as relaxed as you are. But your problems start when you start communicating with others -- especially those who see themselves as scientists working in fields where research and publication procedures are clearly defined and adhered to. And here's the rub.  You want to publish in a scientific journal because that will make you look more respectable in academic circles, but that's where you come up against the buffers, because your modus operandi is to tell people what they are looking at and then to give them some information in support of your conclusion. Your work is dominated by speculations, assumptions and assertions which your colleagues allow you to get away with. But now you dress your information up to be as "scientific" as possible in tables, graphs, diagrams, technical data sheets and so forth -- but it's all a con, and you know it. You are using technology because it suits you, but you are not a scientist, because you cannot, or will not, conform to the scientific publishing convention of problem statement, evidence presentation, interpretation and deduction, discussion and conclusion.

It's all a bit like Putin arranging elections in Russia which are so strictly controlled that they are farcical -- because he NEEDS to demonstrate to the world what an amazing democrat he is, and what a powerful mandate he has from a grateful electorate.  Democracy is the thing you hate the most, but you have to pretend you embrace it so that you can sell yourself to the rest of the world.  Scary, but also rather pathetic.

This is of course all reprehensible.  Back to archaeology and archaeologists.  You are either for science or against it, and it is disingenuous and dishonest of you if you deny or ignore the relevance of science on the one hand and then on the other hand hijack it as a vehicle for the promotion of your ideas or your career.

Well, you might say that the above is all very simplified, and that the reality is more nuanced.  Or maybe more convoluted:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7316%28199901%2964%3A1%3C33%3ATSNOP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

Wonderful stuff from Van Pool and Van Pool, and three cheers for hyperrelativists,  extreme positivistic scientists and nomological approaches.  The authors conclude that ".......on any reasonable criteria or characteristics of science one wishes to use, much of postprocessual archaeology qualifies as science. In fact, postprocessual research may more fully meet several of these criteria than does processual archaeology."   Hmmm.....

Back to the real world.  We need to openly discuss journal publishing policy. I'm not talking here about the glossy popular magazines like Current Archaeology or British Archaeology, whose sales depend on "impact" and spectacular headlines rather than academic rigour.  But in my opinion, based on a string of Stonehenge-related articles, the journal called Antiquity (for example) appears to me to be quite happy to connive in the process of dressing up non-scientific papers as scientific, and facilitating the publication of peer-reviewed material (who, I wonder, are the reviewers?)  which should be rejected out of hand by any journal that seriously adhered to the conventions of scientific publishing. You can dig up my criticisms of the following, one of which was described by a senior academic as "probably the worst paper he has ever had to read":

1. Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2015. Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity 89: 1331–52.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.177
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-antiquity-paper-critical-assessment.html

2. Parker Pearson, M. et al. 2019. Megalith quarries for Stonehenge's bluestones. Antiquity 93: 45–62.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2018.111
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/yet-more-on-quarries-scientific.html

3. Pearson, M. et al. 2021. The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales. Antiquity, 95(379), 85-103.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.239
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2021/02/antiquity-article-on-lost-circle-review.html

Strange that MPP should be the senior author on each of these articles, but he's not entirely to blame -- there are more than a dozen authors altogether, and they cannot avoid corporate responsibility for this state of affairs.  As I see it, the Editor and the publishers must share responsibility as well.  As for other archaeological journals, I don't know them well enough to work out what they are up to, but I would not be surprised to find that post-processualism is having an insiduous and destructive influence on their academic integrity as well.........

So here's my suggestion. One of the big journal publishing giants should start a new journal called "ArchaeoMythology" which is honest enough to recognise that there is a readership for pseudo-science and a group of pseudo-scientific archaeologists who need an outlet for their work.  They can then all happily publish in the magazine, and read articles written by like-minded academics in its pages, and the rest of us can ignore them and get on with life........

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Next, we come to Monty Python and the lessons we might learn from that wonderful film about the hunt for the Holy Grail.   Symbolism in bucket loads. In the scene where King Arthur meets Dennis the Peasant we have comic genius, as Dennis, while grovelling in the mud, gives the king a lesson in political theory.  It's hilarious because of course, if King Arthur had really existed, the following would have applied:
(1)  Dennis would never have heard of King Arthur;
(2)  Dennis would not have known what a king was; and
(3)  Dennis would not have known that there was a country called Britain.

This is a timely reminder that archaeologists who are digging in the mud in this day and age must not presume to know what was inside the heads of peasants who were digging in the mud during the Neolithic.  But that is exactly what MPP and his team have done in proposing their narrative of stones with special properties being quarried from sacred places and transported all the way to Stonehenge during a coordinated series of heavy lift expeditions.  The narrative is so extraordinary that it has to be underpinned by an extraordinary set of beliefs imposed from afar, 5000 years later, by modern academics onto a distant tribal group.  So MPP, in his abundant writings, speculates on ancestor cults, political unification, stones with special qualities, tributes, orgies, sacred sites, rituals, ceremonial landscapes etc with gay abandon, much to the irritation of people who prefer to see some facts.  He even claims, in order to justify the sophistication which he imposes on the Neolithic tribes of Preseli, that “this was one of the great religious and political centres of Neolithic Britain."  As many others (including archaeologists) have pointed out, that claim is simply not supported by the evidence on the ground, and is just another piece of interpretative inflation.

As Hitchens reminds us: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" and as Carl Sagan further reminds us: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

To assume that the tribes of West Wales had the technical skills, the mental maps, the motivation, the manpower and raw material resources, and the leadership to make 80 or so monolith transporting expeditions by sea or overland is to enter a quagmire with no escape. And this is what MPP and his team will be forced to confront as they see their narrative collapsing, bit by bit, around their ears. When Stephen Briggs argued for opportunistic, rather that deterministic, stone gathering in the Neolithic, he was basing his argument on rather solid evidence; and as I have argued many times before, the great mass of the population at the time were not driven by rituals, belief systems, political aspirations or economic ambition but by things that were much simpler -- the need for warmth, clothing, food, safety and comradeship within secure family groups. It was all very utilitarian. The locals inhabiting the slopes of Mynydd Preseli  would have had much in common with Dennis the Peasant. They would have had no knowledge at all of Stonehenge, which was at that time in any case just a circular earthwork no more significant than hundreds of others. They would have had no reason to cart lots of stones from here to there, involving a stupendous logistical challenge. They would in any case not have known how to get there................

If Mike and his colleagues want to continue to elaborate their wondrous narrative, let them do it in the pages of this new journal which somebody will surely wish to create -- and in its pages they can entertain each other with fantastical narratives and jolly romps for many years to come, while leaving the rest of us in peace.

Thursday 14 March 2024

In praise of Popper

 


A nice pic from the Caldey Island Facebook page -- it reminded me of Karl Popper's exhortation to scientists that they should concentrate their efforts on the falsification of existing hypotheses.  The famous example of course is the hypothesis that "All swans are white" --  which was widely accepted as correct, of course, long ago, until somebody discovered that some swans are black as well.

This was one of the themes of by talk in Fishguard last night -- I urged people not to blindly "follow the science" (as we were exhorted to do during the dark days of the Pandemic) but to knowledgeably challenge the science presented in learned papers and especially to take everything presented in banner headlines in the media with a large dose of salt.

My main theme, of course, was that we should all recognise mythology for what it is, especially when it is dressed up as science.  But more of that anon...... 

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Stephen Briggs and others on erratics and prehistoric tool making



Cumbrian erratic dispersal (Stephen Briggs)

I should have thought it was a no-brainer that erratics would have been used as raw materials for tool making back in the Neolithic -- but apparently there has been quite a lot of fuss about this in "lithic" circles.  This paper by Stephen Briggs lays out some of the arguments from both sides, and highlights some of the rather nasty animosities too:  

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273564142_Erratics_and_Re-cycled_Stone_scholarly_irrelevancies_or_fundamental_utilities_to_lithic_studies_in_prehistoric_Britain_and_beyond


Abstract

There are many theories explaining later prehistoric 'trade' and 'exchange systems' in stone artefacts. Evidence matching the petrographic information of transported implements with the country rock (local bedrock) where 'factories' produced flaked stone axes is felt to be compelling. Consequently, across Europe it is widely believed that the only way 'factory' rock could have reached the places where artefacts have been found was by human carriage. The discovery of implement working floors, or 'factories' in montane areas (c. 1900-1970) on primary exposures of stone, lithologically almost identical to polished axes found considerable distances from them, has led to a belief in the industrial, economic or social processing and carriage of finished products. There are caveats to this proof of evidence, however. Natural processes constantly redistribute incalculable numbers of durable erratic pebble- to boulder-sized clasts, so why could these not have been used for making prehistoric artefacts? There is abundant evidence in the archaeological record that artefacts were crafted from such material. And although there is now an archive of petrographic thin-sections available to help to identify the origins of the artefacts, no comparable data are available on re-cycled stone. Implement provenancing is therefore unlikely to be of lasting scientific value until investigative programmes have accumulated far more accurate petrographic data on pebbles and erratics from superficial deposits. Comparisons between some British-Irish implement distribution patterns with those of glacial erratics suggests the available evidence already better fits an interpretation of deterministic and opportunistic stone procurement rather than one involving long-distance travel by prehistoric peoples. Extensive, long-term sampling and provenancing programmes are now needed to address this requirement.

It's interesting that in some quarters it has been deemed perfectly OK to say that tools were made from "destroyed Stonehenge orthostats" but that tools would not have been made from erratics of suitable rock found lying about in the countryside.  In other words, Stonehenge orthostats would have had high value, and scattered erratics would not.  At the heart of the debate is Stephen's contention that Neolithic toolmakers were involved in the "opportunistic" rather than the "deterministic" use of stone. In the latter scenario tool-makers would have targetted certain rock-types and maybe used quarries to find the perfect stones that they needed. (That belief of course lies at the heart of the bluestone debate.) Clearly there is a huge difference (in the minds of archaeologists) between a society of utilitarian or opportunistic tool-makers and one in which certain stone types were targetted because they were deemed special -- or even sacred! A relatively primitive and adaptable society on the one hand, and on the other a society in which there were high and low value items, sacred places and a degree of societal stratification. The stone age artisan versus the sophisticated tribal specialist who had a status attached to his skill level in the working of stone.

As an extension of the idea that Neolithic tool makers had a "deterministic" strategy, it helps if you can demonstrate that their tribal society was capable of creating a landscape full of ritual features which marked it out as being more "advanced" or sophisticated than neighbouring landscapes. This is what lies behind MPP's insistence that the Mynydd Preseli area was one of the great cultural centres of western Britain.......... But it's a circular argument. Because there were quarries and lost circles and so forth, that shows the local tribal society was quite advanced compared with others. And because society was quite advanced, it should come as no surprise that there were sacred places, quarries and stone circles. In my view it's all nonsense. The density of ritual or sacred features in the landscape here is interesting, of course, but no greater than anywhere else in SW Wales, as pointed out by Figgis and many other archaeologists.

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Another influential article on a similar topic is this one.  Sadly, it's stuck behind another of those wretched paywalls.

Geochemical provenancing of igneous glacial erratics from Southern Britain, and implications for prehistoric stone implement distributions

Olwen Williams-Thorpe, Don Aldiss, Ian J. Rigby, Richard S. Thorpe
First published: 22 February 1999

https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6548(199903)14:3<209::AID-GEA1>3.0.CO;2-7


Abstract

Sixteen basic and intermediate composition igneous glacial erratics from Anglian (pre-423,000 years) deposits in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire, southern Britain, were selected for chemical and petrographic analysis in order to determine their original source outcrops. Major and trace element compositions suggest that seven samples (plus two uncertain) originated in the Lower Carboniferous volcanics of the Scottish Midland Valley (SMV), four came from the Upper Carboniferous quartz dolerite association which crops out in Scotland, northern England (Whin Sill) and extends to Norway, and one came from the northern England Cleveland Dyke. One sample of altered dolerite is ambiguous but has some similarity to the Old Red Sandstone (Devonian) age lavas of the SMV, and one meta-basalt sample may be from southwest Scotland or Scandinavia. These results identify specific outcrops which provided glacial erratics within currently accepted ice trails in the United Kingdom, and provide the first supporting evidence based on geochemistry, rather than petrography, for these ice movements. The distribution and provenance of glacial erratics are of importance in archaeological studies, because erratics provided a potential source of raw material for stone implement production. There is a marked geographical correlation between the distribution of prehistoric stone implements of quartz dolerite in the United Kingdom, and directions of ice movements from quartz dolerite outcrops within Britain. This correlation lends support to the hypothesis that prehistoric man made extensive use of glacial erratics for implement manufacture, as an alternative to quarrying at outcrops and subsequent long-distance trade.