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Stonehenge and its Environs
Re: The bluestone debate
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That's all fair enough. Of course we can never be certain about these things -- but with my background, I will always look first for a natural explanation and then -- if there is some incontrovertible piece of evidence against it -- move on to an alternative. Quite often, as Olwen Williams-Thorpe and colleagues have pointed out, stones in megalithoic monuments assumed to have come from a long way off turn out not to have come very far at all. We need to know exact provenances for stones (sadly, that's not that easy in many cases without detailed geochemistry of the type that has now differentiated the ORS Cosheston Beds from the Senni Beds and sorted out the source of the Altar Stone) and also ice flow directions. (Other processes can move big stones too -- tsunamis, landslides, drifting ice floes, jokulhlaups etc -- and in some cases they migh be important.) By the way, Jamieson was writing a century ago -- the idea of "ice-free Buchan" has now been discredited. It was glaciated, but the ice that covered it was probably cold-based, and its landscape effects were limited.


Reply | with quote		Posted by mountainman
19th December 2008ce
10:11

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