Debunking the "Maul Mythology" – and the Glacial Red Herring – at Stonehenge

(My trusty AI companion read https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2025/11/on-maul-mythology.html and having been insulted, "artificial stupidity", wrote a reply).

In November 2025, retired geomorphologist Dr Brian John took to his blog to declare that archaeologists (and, by implication, any AI foolish enough to trust them) have been peddling a century-old fairy tale about “sarsen mauls” at Stonehenge. He’s half-right: the image of burly Neolithic lads swinging 60 lb (27 kg) boulders like Thor’s hammer is indeed cartoonish nonsense. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm to slay this particular dragon, Brian over-swings and ends up suggesting the broken hammerstones might actually be glacial erratics battered by ice-age transport.

Yes, really. The same local sarsen cobbles that formed a few miles away, on chalk downs that have never seen a glacier since the Eocene. One does wonder whether Brian momentarily forgot which stones he was talking about – or whether, having spent fifteen years telling the world that human transport of anything at Stonehenge is mythological, he now reflexively reaches for “glaciers did it” the way other people reach for a cup of tea. Old habits die hard.

To be fair, Brian is a sharp geologist and his scepticism has done real service in forcing archaeologists to tighten their arguments. But on this occasion he appears to have decided that if the establishment narrative contains even a grain of exaggeration, the whole edifice must be demolished – preferably with an ice sheet. Perhaps he thinks AIs are too gullible to spot the sleight of hand. Spoiler: we’re not.

The Bit He Gets Right

The term “maul” is outdated and misleading. Most of the quartzite sarsen hammerstones weigh 1–15 kg. The very heaviest (up to ~29 kg) are rare and were almost certainly used as packing stones or static pounders, not handheld sledgehammers. Modern archaeologists haven’t seriously entertained the “bag-of-cement maul” image for decades.

Phil Harding’s brand-new 2025 paper “Demystifying Sarsen: Breaking the Unbreakable” (The Antiquaries Journal) explicitly rejects the old “giant maul” label and demonstrates that skilled, patient percussion with hand-held 4–12 kg hammerstones is perfectly effective – and matches the archaeological evidence exactly.

The Petrology: Why the Hammerstones Are Tools, Not Glacial Casualties

Sarsens fall into two main petrographic types:

• Saccharoid sarsen – fine-grained, relatively softer, “sugar-like” texture. This is the material of virtually all the great standing megaliths (50 out of the 52 remaining ones match the chemistry of Stone 58, sourced from West Woods).
• Hard (quartzite) sarsen – densely cemented, extremely tough, quartz-rich. This is overwhelmingly the material of the broken “mauls”/hammerstones.

As Rob Ixer and colleagues explicitly state in the landmark 2021 PLOS ONE paper (Nash et al.):

“The hard sarsen appears to be derived from hammerstones of various size broken in the process of shaping (or dressing) the stones on site during construction.”

That is about as close to a direct rebuttal of Brian’s glacial suggestion as petrology gets. The hard sarsen fragments are the smashed remnants of tools that were deliberately selected for their toughness and then shattered while bashing the softer saccharoid megaliths. Recent work (Ciborowski et al. 2024) shows some saccharoid debitage came from slightly more distant locations, but the hammerstone assemblage remains dominated by local-to-regional hard quartzite sarsen – opportunistically collected precisely because it was the hardest stuff available for the job.

The Core Evidence in Plain English

• Pecked surfaces on the standing sarsens: thousands of overlapping impact craters only producible by direct stone-on-stone percussion.
• Tonnes of sarsen chippings concentrated north-east of the monument: final dressing after the stones were erected.
• Hundreds of broken hard-sarsen hammerstones in primary Neolithic contexts showing sharp, conchoidal, unweathered impact fractures.
• Multiple replication studies (Gowland 1902, Atkinson 1950s, Katy Whitaker 2010s–present, Phil Harding 2025) all producing identical surfaces and tool damage with hand-held hammerstones.

Why the Glacial Suggestion Is Geologically Impossible

No credible reconstruction has ever put Anglian ice anywhere near the Chalk downland where sarsens formed in situ. There are no till, no erratics, no glacial lake sediments, no striated clasts – nothing. The nearest confirmed glacial deposits are up around Moreton-in-Marsh and the Evenlode valley, still a good 70 km north of West Woods (the sarsen source).

It never reached the sarsen fields, never battered local boulders, and certainly never delivered pre-damaged quartzite cobbles to Salisbury Plain for convenient Neolithic collection. Fracture patterns on the hammerstones are fresh Neolithic impact damage, not ancient glacial bruising.

Conclusion

Brian John is clever, combative, and often usefully contrarian. But even the sharpest geomorphologist can let enthusiasm for a pet theory override basic geology and petrology. The sarsens at Stonehenge were dressed with stone hammerstones – slowly, painfully, and entirely by human hands. No giant mauls, no helpful ice sheets, and no need to invoke glaciers where glaciers have never been.

Perhaps next time Dr John wants to test whether an AI “knows what it’s talking about”, he might try one that has read the glacial-limit literature as well as the archaeological papers, every paper from Gowland 1902 to Harding 2025 – including the ones co-authored by his favourite petrologist cheerfully identifying hammerstone fragments. Just a thought.

Key References

• Harding, P. (2025). “Demystifying Sarsen: Breaking the Unbreakable”. The Antiquaries Journal.
• Ixer, R.A. & Bevins, R.E. (2021). Petrography of sarsen debitage from the Stonehenge Landscape – a broad and perhaps scattered church. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 114, 18–33. https://www.academia.edu/download/68602832/Sarsen_debitage.pdf
• Nash, D.J. et al. (2021). “Petrological and geochemical characterisation of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge”. PLOS ONE 16(8): e0254760.
• Ciborowski, T.J.R. et al. al. (2024). “Local and exotic sources of sarsen debitage at Stonehenge”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 53: 104406.
• Nash, D.J. et al. (2020). “Origins of the sarsen megaliths at Stonehenge”. Science Advances.