I am told there is some confusion being spread about glaciers and ice sheets flowing uphill. Contrary to the impression some people have got they obey the simple law of gravity, they flow downhill.
Sunday 31 December 2023
The Ups and Downs of Ice Flow
Thursday 28 December 2023
Recent Ice Dropped Boulders
Bristol Channel Boulders - No Ice Required
Glacial Gradients and Gravity
Just a reminder that during the last ice age the Bristol Channel was above sea level and was a deep wide valley. Glaciers flow downhill so rather than the ice floating up the channel and landing on the Somerset coast from south Pembrokeshire it would have followed the gradient.
Unpredictable weather not unprecedented again.
A year ago The National Trust warned of the dangers of the new norm of "tumultuous weather" - https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/weather-and-wildlife-2022 This year the National Trust is: "sounding the alarm for UK wildlife as the loss of predictable weather patterns and traditional seasonal shifts causes chaos for nature." https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/services/media/weather-and-wildlife-2023
As a worrier myself, and as this endangers ancient sites, I was intrigued enough to quickly look to at the historical records to see if the unpredictability was unprecedented.Sunday 24 December 2023
Debunking Pigs From Scotland
Last year I did a round-up of the Isotope evidence for "neolithic pigs from Scotland" - https://www.sarsen.org/2022/10/strontium-values-reappraisal-south-west.html .
I missed another paper that came out a fortnight later:
"We have tested this application using a sample of Neolithic pig enamel from sites in southern England, some of which, because of Sr isotope composition, could not be excluded from an origin in northern Britain. Pb isotope data from the teeth excludes Scotland as a source but the diverse range of Pb isotope results, combined with other isotope proxies, are consistent with the animals being raised on a variety of lithologies of diverse age and from variable environments."
So is this end of the idea of neolithic links between Scotland and Stonehenge, I wouldn't bet on it.
Thursday 21 December 2023
Laying out the Sarsen horseshoe using triangles.
From William Stukeley onwards the geometry underlying the arrangement of the stones of Stonehenge has lead to many different diagrams, usually with arcs and sometimes with triangles and hexagons.
Quick doodles based on the triangle I deduced from Tim Darvill's work: https://www.sarsen.org/2023/05/ding-dong-over-stonehenge-timekeeping.html has lead me to simple diagram which matches the geometry of the flat faces of the trilithons in the inner horseshoe. It seems different to the historical other diagrams I have seen but I would be surprised if it is new. If you know of a prior example please tell me.
Please excuse a rough diagram:
Behold, I respond, if you turn the triangle one gap rather than two it gives a 12 degree twist which is close enough for government work.
Wednesday 8 November 2023
Led Zeppelin’s missing photograph has been found.
The original of the iconic photograph on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV was recently discovered and will soon be on display at the Wiltshire Museum.
Visitors will for the first time be able to clearly see the face that has stared out from millions of albums across the world.
After conservation work an exhibition ‘The Wiltshire Thatcher: A Photographic Journey through Victorian Wessex’ is scheduled to open on Saturday 6th April 2024 and run through until Sunday 1st September 2024
The photograph was spotted in a Victorian album at a public auction by Brian Edwards, a Visiting Research Fellow with The Regional History Centre, UWE Bristol.
The mystery of who the figure was been solved after half a century.
He was a thatcher from Wiltshire, Lot Long (1823 -1893) from Mere.
Led Zeppelin IV
The untitled album, usually known as IV, was released on November 8, 1971, and has sold more than 37 million copies worldwide.
The album was Classic Rock’s Greatest Album of All
Time - https://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/steveparker/classicrock.htm and remains Led Zeppelin’s ‘most streamed album
today.’ https://musicdatablog.com.ar/en/ranked-albums/led-zeppelin-discography-streaming/
The album’s cover artwork was radically absent of any indication of the musicians or a title but featured the iconic framed image, often been referred to as a painting, which was discovered by Robert Plant in an antique shop near Jimmy Page’s house in Pangbourne, Berkshire.
The framed colour image of an elderly man carrying a large bundle of hazel sticks on his back will be recognised worldwide.
Closer inspection reveals this framed image was a coloured photograph, the whereabouts of which is now unknown.
The original, which is now in Wiltshire Museum, has tantalising fingerprints from it being copied using coloured inks.
The discovery
The Victorian photograph was discovered by Brian in an auction catalogue of sale in Dorchester, an album titled ‘Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.’ Tim Daw was able to attend the auction, verified it was the genuine photo and bought it on behalf of the Museum.
Featuring exceptional photographs from Wiltshire,
Dorset and Somerset, the Victorian photograph album contained over 100
architectural views and street scenes together with a few portraits of rural
workers. Most of the photographs are titled and beneath the photograph made
famous by Led Zeppelin the photographer has written ‘A Wiltshire Thatcher.’
A photographer named Ernest
There was no further clue to the photographer’s identity and either side of the turn of the century there were over 300 photographers named Ernest.
The search was on for a largely unknown Victorian photographer of great talent and skill, probably with extensive training in chemistry.
A part of a signature matching with writing in the album, suggests the needle in this haystack is Ernest Howard Farmer (1856-1944), the first head of the School of Photography at the then newly renamed Polytechnic Regent Street. Now part of the University of Westminster, Farmer had worked in the same building as the instructor of photography since 1882, when it was then known as the Polytechnic Young Men’s Christian Institute.
The Wiltshire thatcher
About 50 thatchers were identified through trade directories and the census. In the Southwest of Wiltshire, where the other album photos were taken, only one was of a similar age to the figure in the photograph.
This was Lot Long (sometimes Longyear), who was born in Mere in 1823 and died in 1893. At the time the photograph was taken, Lot was a widower living in a small cottage on the Shaftesbury Road in Mere. Whilst certain corroboration has not yet been found, family resemblances and circumstantial evidence support this identification.
Note on the exhibition
David Dawson, Director of Wiltshire Museum, said: “This exhibition will be a celebration of the work of Ernest Farmer, who today is little-known but was a leading figure in the development of photography as an art form. Through the exhibition, we will show how Farmer captured the spirit of people, villages and landscapes of Wiltshire and Dorset that were so much of a contrast to his life in London. It is fascinating to see how this theme of rural and urban contrasts was developed by Led Zeppelin and became the focus for this iconic album cover 70 years later.”
Thursday 2 November 2023
The Stone Circles - A Field Guide - Coming April 2024
The Stone Circles
A Field Guide
Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings Imprint: Yale University Press The definitive guide to the stone circles of Britain and Ireland From Stonehenge and the Ring of Brogdar to the Rollright Stones and Avebury, the British and Irish Isles are scattered with the stone circles of our prehistoric ancestors. Although there have been many theories to explain them, to this day there is no consensus about their purpose. Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings provide a clear and illuminating field guide to 424 key stone circle sites in Britain and Ireland. Organised by region, this handy volume sets out the features of these megalithic monuments, including their landscape position, construction, and physical properties. The authors take stock of cutting-edge research and recent excavations stone circles that were previously lost to time. They present new insights on the chronology, composition, and roles of different circles to transform our understanding the sites. Beautifully illustrated with photographs, maps, and plans, this is an essential guide to Britain and Ireland’s most mysterious prehistoric monuments.Friday 27 October 2023
Mynydd Preseli Lidar
Thursday 12 October 2023
The Stonehenge Altar Stone was probably not sourced from the Old Red Sandstone of the Anglo-Welsh Basin
The Stonehenge Altar Stone was probably not sourced from the Old Red Sandstone of the Anglo-Welsh Basin: Time to broaden our geographic and stratigraphic horizons?,
Richard E. Bevins, Nick J.G. Pearce, Rob A. Ixer, Duncan Pirrie, Sergio Andò, Stephen Hillier, Peter Turner, Matthew Power,
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 51, 2023, 104215,
ISSN 2352-409X,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104215.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X23003905)
Abstract: Stone 80, the recumbent Altar Stone, is the largest of the Stonehenge foreign “bluestones”, mainly igneous rocks forming the inner Stonehenge circle. The Altar Stone’s anomalous lithology, a sandstone of continental origin, led to the previous suggestion of a provenance from the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) of west Wales, close to where the majority of the bluestones have been sourced (viz. the Mynydd Preseli area in west Wales) some 225 km west of Stonehenge. Building upon earlier investigations we have examined new samples from the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) within the Anglo-Welsh Basin (covering south Wales, the Welsh Borderland, the West Midlands and Somerset) using traditional optical petrography but additionally portable XRF, automated SEM-EDS and Raman Spectroscopic techniques. One of the key characteristics of the Altar Stone is its unusually high Ba content (all except one of 106 analyses have Ba > 1025 ppm), reflecting high modal baryte. Of the 58 ORS samples analysed to date from the Anglo-Welsh Basin, only four show analyses where Ba exceeds 1000 ppm, similar to the lower range of the Altar Stone composition. However, because of their contrasting mineralogies, combined with data collected from new automated SEM-EDS and Raman Spectroscopic analyses these four samples must be discounted as being from the source of the Altar Stone. It now seems ever more likely that the Altar Stone was not derived from the ORS of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, and therefore it is time to broaden our horizons, both geographically and stratigraphically into northern Britain and also to consider continental sandstones of a younger age. There is no doubt that considering the Altar Stone as a ‘bluestone’ has influenced thinking regarding the long-held view to a source in Wales. We therefore propose that the Altar Stone should be ‘de-classified’ as a bluestone, breaking a link to the essentially Mynydd Preseli-derived bluestones.
Keywords: Neolithic; Stonehenge; Altar Stone; Sandstone analysis; Provenancing
Under a Creative Commons license
Monday 25 September 2023
The Altar Stone in close up
Full size photo - https://photos.app.goo.gl/fgJgkqLgdkMhzvyj9
Thought experiment: What if the Altar Stone is a later, say, Roman addition to the monument? Is there anything that proves it isn't? If it was what would we expect it to be like? How could we tell? Where might they have brought it from?
The answer is probably where would we expect to find debitage from it and it seems it was found deeper than we we would expect from such a late introduction to the site.
Sunday 24 September 2023
Saturday 23 September 2023
The Altar Stone - Not welsh, so where is it from?
An important paper on the Stonehenge Altar Stone has just been released:
It probably didn't come from South Wales and surrounding areas.
Its petrographic fingerprint which includes a diagnostic high Barium (Ba) content mostly doesn't match the Old Red Sandstones (ORS) of the area, and the ORS rocks there that also have a high Ba don't match other characteristics.
The hunt for the source is on. Suitable areas that also have neolithic sites are the top suspects.
The Stonehenge Altar Stone was probably not sourced from the Old Red Sandstone of the Anglo-Welsh Basin: Time to broaden our geographic and stratigraphic horizons?,
AbstractStone 80, the recumbent Altar Stone, is the largest of the Stonehenge foreign “bluestones”, mainly igneous rocks forming the inner Stonehenge circle. The Altar Stone’s anomalous lithology, a sandstone of continental origin, led to the previous suggestion of a provenance from the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) of west Wales, close to where the majority of the bluestones have been sourced (viz. the Mynydd Preseli area in west Wales) some 225 km west of Stonehenge. Building upon earlier investigations we have examined new samples from the Old Red Sandstone (ORS) within the Anglo-Welsh Basin (covering south Wales, the Welsh Borderland, the West Midlands and Somerset) using traditional optical petrography but additionally portable XRF, automated SEM-EDS and Raman Spectroscopic techniques. One of the key characteristics of the Altar Stone is its unusually high Ba content (all except one of 106 analyses have Ba > 1025 ppm), reflecting high modal baryte. Of the 58 ORS samples analysed to date from the Anglo-Welsh Basin, only four show analyses where Ba exceeds 1000 ppm, similar to the lower range of the Altar Stone composition. However, because of their contrasting mineralogies, combined with data collected from new automated SEM-EDS and Raman Spectroscopic analyses these four samples must be discounted as being from the source of the Altar Stone. It now seems ever more likely that the Altar Stone was not derived from the ORS of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, and therefore it is time to broaden our horizons, both geographically and stratigraphically into northern Britain and also to consider continental sandstones of a younger age. There is no doubt that considering the Altar Stone as a ‘bluestone’ has influenced thinking regarding the long-held view to a source in Wales. We therefore propose that the Altar Stone should be ‘de-classified’ as a bluestone, breaking a link to the essentially Mynydd Preseli-derived bluestones.
Richard E. Bevins, Nick J.G. Pearce, Rob A. Ixer, Duncan Pirrie, Sergio Andò, Stephen Hillier, Peter Turner, Matthew Power,
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 51, 2023, 104215,ISSN 2352-409X,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104215
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X23003905)
Friday 22 September 2023
Ground Penetrating Bayonet
Thursday 21 September 2023
The underside of stone 55B - 1958
Wednesday 20 September 2023
Craig Rhos-y-felin Bullet Stones
Photos of quarry from, and more information available at :
Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2015
Mike Parker Pearson , Richard Bevins , Rob Ixer , Joshua Pollard , Colin Richards , Kate Welham , Ben Chan , Kevan Edinborough , Derek Hamilton , Richard Macphail , Duncan Schlee , Jean-Luc Schwenninger , Ellen Simmons and Martin Smith
Craig Rhos-y-felin 2014 - 2023
Thursday 7 September 2023
Strange lines in the landscape
Tuesday 29 August 2023
The Little Britain Stonehenge
Kenny Brophy - "...recently visited Stonehenge, curious to see how this icon of Britishness is presented to visitors and tourists. ...It is very clear that the Stonehenge experience – the real Stonehenge – is a long way removed from the idealised Stonehenge we keep getting told about. If this monument is a jewel in the crown, it’s a fake.
The reality is sadly many miles removed from the glossy airport adverts – make no mistake, visiting Stonehenge in the summer these days is a tawdry, tacky experience......The very existence of Stonehenge is political, created in many phases of activity that were designed to empower and boost certain individuals and interest groups. Medieval stories about the stones were political too, origin myths to support claims of power and the status quo. These stones have been and continue to be used to peddle myths about the past while conserving power and control today – academic power, political power, power over access, an essential celebrity and politician photo opportunity, a place that one has to be associated with...
Thursday 24 August 2023
An Erratic Train of Thought
The good Dr John, however, seeks inadvertently to confuse: "Whatever its erratic history may be, the boulder demonstrates that the Irish Sea Glacier impinged upon the Gower coast, carrying erratics from the west and displacing local Welsh ice on at least one occasion."
Wednesday 16 August 2023
The Ice Rafted Giant's Rock at Porthleven, Cornwall (probably).
Tuesday 15 August 2023
Debating Visual Truth at Stonehenge in the Seventeenth Century
Over the course of the seventeenth century, two representations of Stonehenge—one published in William Camden’s Britannia (1600) and the other in Inigo Jones’s Stone-heng Restored (1655)—were invoked repeatedly in an intensifying debate over the monument’s origins. This debate engaged both the virtuosi community of the Royal Society and members of the closely related, fledgling world of English architectural discourse, and the two representations became the common ground for both conversation and contestation. This paper traces the entangled afterlives of these two images, and argues that their reproduction and reinterpretation by members of natural history, antiquarian, and architectural communities created both discord and new, collective knowledge. Drawing on recent work exploring how images produced for divergent purposes and audiences were integrated into natural philosophical study, I explore how, through their reproduction, alteration, and recontextualization, these images functioned as tools of both division and mediation, and created space for debate and new investigation.
Kaemmer, H. (2023). Description or Design: Debating Visual Truth at Stonehenge in the Seventeenth Century. Nuncius, 38(2), 278-310. https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10064
William Rogers, perspective of Stonehenge from William Camden’s Britannia (London: Printed for George Bishop, 1600), 252
Monday 14 August 2023
Erratic Castaway
Just a reminder that any Glacial erratic found on the edge of a body of water is probably a boulder that hitched a ride on an iceberg rather than evidence of actual glaciers.
"An iceberg carries a rock though Jökulsárlón, Iceland's glacial lagoon." https://pin.it/3xNpM9M
Thursday 10 August 2023
Current terminology of the Stonehenge bluestones lithologies.
From: Bevins, R., Ixer, R., Pearce, N., Scourse, J., & Daw, T. (2023). Lithological description and provenancing of a collection of bluestones from excavations at Stonehenge by William Hawley in 1924 with implications for the human versus ice transport debate of the monument's bluestone megaliths. Geoarchaeology, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.21971
Sunday 6 August 2023
Moving Poetry from Google's Bard
(Trans)
By the hands of ancient people
Stones still stand tall
Carried by ancient hands,
Standing strong today.
That the ancient 'henge stones are glacial.
But their theory lacks,
Any supporting facts,
So the myth is complete cock and bull.
Who said, "Dost thou know
The bluestones are the work of a human hand ?
And do they not still stand, and still they show
That their sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things?"
For the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
The false words that icy fingers brought them here
The King of Kings, pure proven truth, has clearly said
To tell the charlatans to look and despair.
Of their theory nought remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level grasses stretch far away.”
Wednesday 26 July 2023
Moving and raising megaliths in France
Tuesday 25 July 2023
La construction du dolmen de Menga, Mantequera, Málaga
Human Transport of Megaliths - Experimental Evidence
The archaeological park which integrates the necropolis also contains several educational spaces intended to evoke the construction of megaliths , through the experiments carried out between 1979 and 1998 in Exoudun-Bougon, and the large Neolithic collective habitat of the Fief Baudouin discovered in Airvault .
- The text and photos are translated from the French version of Wikipedia entry for the site and used under under CC BY-SA 4.0 -
1979 experiments
These experiments were directed by Jean-Pierre Mohen. For details see Jean-Pierre Mohen and Chris Scarre (with the participation of F. Bouin, E. Cariou, P. Chambon), The tumulus of Bougon (Deux-Sèvres): Megalithic complex from the 5th to the 3rd millennium , Paris, Errance 2002 (ISBN 2-87772-240-6 and 978-2-87772-240-7 )
The first experiment concerned the extraction of a large megalithic slab of 3 m by 2.50m from a rocky outcrop located on the Chaumes plateau in Exoudun . The block was surrounded on three sides by large cracks. The fourth side was hollowed out by three people with chalk hammers . Wider notches were dug with these same hammers and antler picks, in the faults to drive wooden wedges into them. The wooden corners were wetted to make them swell in volume and the slab came off after an hour of work. It was then lifted with wooden levers to be able to slide wooden rolls of about 10 cm in diameter intended to move it .
The second experiment aimed to test a transport system for a monumental slab of the type found in tumulus F2. Faced with the impossibility of having a natural slab of this type, a concrete copy of the slab of tumulus F2 was made (identical weight and volume - a single slab 6 m long by 3.50 m wide and 1.30 m high whose weight is estimated at 32 tons). A removable transport path was built with unbarked wooden rollers 40 cm in diameter. The ropes were made from viburnum and ivy fibers by a craftsman according to a tradition still in force on local farms at the beginning of the 20th century . The block, covered with a braided rope net, rested on the wooden rollers arranged perpendicular to the two rails of the raceway. On July 28, 1979, 230 people pulling on ropes and 20 others pushing the block managed to move it 40 m away. Raising the block to 0.50m in height with three levers was then successfully tested.
Experimental archaeology: equipment used
Liberliger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons - Click to enlarge
1997 experiment
In 1997, F. Collin and B. Poisonnier experimented on site with a new “proto-wheel” type traction system with the 32-tonne test block. In this system, the principle of the removable path is retained but each roller is transformed into a hub after having fitted four recesses at each end. These recesses are intended to receive levers arranged radially to drive the movement of the roller. The experiment made it possible to move the block with only about thirty people while saving most of the ropes and the pullers. However, no mechanism of this kind is attested in the Neolithic period.
1998 experiment
In 1998, B. Poisonnier and R. Joussaume experimented with the construction of a trilith at a height of 1.50 m using levers and wooden wedges.
By Jochen Jahnke, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12221012