Stonehenge and its Environs 134
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Wot he said, bigtime.
And I too haven't employed circular reasoning and I too don't think glaciation is not a possibility, certainly up to Somerset anyway.

But I don't agree there is far less uncertainty about glacial transport. One main reason is exactly what you yourself said: "How far inland? Still uncertain".

If I go out in my local ploughed field I can pick up hundreds of pebbles in ten minutes and no two will be the same or from the same place, due to glacial transport. When I go in a ploughed field on Salisbury Plain, I can't. I'd need that explaining before I agreed there was a strong probability the bluestones were delivered by nature and not fetched from many miles away.

Quote: ....."not local and had to be brought to the site without the help of glaciation , particularly in major monuments . e.g. Stonehenge (sarsens ), Newgrange , Old Keig and possibly Brodgar .

Since when did the sarsens at Stonehenge come from a long way off? HH Thomas (among many others) thought they had come from the neighbourhood, and I can't see any evidence to suggest that he was wrong on this one. The fact that Atkinson developed a great story for the sarsen transport doesn't mean it happened. Newgrange? Small white quartz stones from a long way off as "ornamental features" -- wouldn't have a problem with that being done by chaps with haversacks. Old Keig? Where's the evidence that the big stones are not erratics? The Orkney examples -- there are mentions of quarries in connection with the standing stones, but I'd like to have a look at these sites with reference to ice-movements / erratic distributions as well. At Brodgar, Renfrew thought that the stones had come from the ditch around the stones, and not from the so-called quarry.

In the "The great stone circles project" (Antiquity 2005) there are lots of references to quarries, but somewhat surprisingly the archaeologists involved fail to refer to erratics at all..........

What do I mean by "local"? Thorpe and Williams-Thorpe (Antiquity 1991) looked at all of the UK sites and found that the megalith builders used stones from up to 2 km away quite often, but that there was no case of stones being carried more than 5 km. So let's refer to all of these sites as "using locally-sourced stones."