Friday, 31 January 2025

None of the Stonehenge Stones are Local

The new paper on the Cuckoo and Tor stones (*) posits that they are not local to Salisbury Plain and were brought from West Woods. It goes further and claims that no large numbers of large sarsens with a chemistry the same as those at West Woods are likely to have originated near Stonehenge.

This is surprising. They debate the obvious question here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-prehistoric-society/article/earliest-movement-of-sarsen-into-the-stonehenge-landscape-new-insights-from-geochemical-and-visibility-analysis-of-the-cuckoo-stone-and-tor-stone/C7C6D363A6E59D0BBF5C3158077ABB24#s4

Geological implications

Our inference that the Cuckoo Stone and Tor Stone probably originated in the West Woods area directly challenges the suggestion made by Richards (Reference Richards and Parker2020) that both stones were either already situated at, or close to, their source locations when they were monumentalised. There is, however, a potential counter argument that would support Richards’ view: rather than the two stones being moved from West Woods, could it be that large sarsen boulders with a geochemistry similar to those at West Woods were already present in the Stonehenge landscape near the sites where the two stones were raised?

Their answer is no and I find their reasoning compelling.




* HARDING, P. et al. (2025) ‘Earliest Movement of Sarsen Into the Stonehenge Landscape: New Insights from Geochemical and Visibility Analysis of the Cuckoo Stone and Tor Stone’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, pp. 1–23. doi:10.1017/ppr.2024.13.

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