The Mynachlogddu bluestone quarrying experiment
BRIAN JOHN at Stonehenge and the Ice Age - 4 hours ago
Back in prehistory -- in the spring of 1986, to be precise -- I was paid a few quid by a Japanese TV company to conduct a scientific experiment into a quarrying technique that might have been employed at Carn Meini or somewhere else during the quest for bluestone monoliths. This was the fire and water method -- heating the rock with fire and suddenly cooling it with cold water. (This all presumes that people wanted to QUARRY monoliths from the living rock rather then picking them up from the ground surface, where they lie in profusion -- but no matter. Science is science, and a... more »
A lesson from prehistory
BRIAN JOHN at Stonehenge and the Ice Age - 6 hours ago
Well well -- now here is a funny thing. I have taken a bit of stick from assorted Stonehenge "experts" for daring to float the notion that Stonehenge was never finished, and that the builders simply ran out of stones. I was looking for some photos on my file (nothing to do with Stonehenge) when I happened upon this extract. No idea whose words these are, or what the publication was, but it all sounds perfectly sensible to me........
The Stonehenge bluestones -- pontification is not a substitute for evidence
BRIAN JOHN at Stonehenge and the Ice Age - 2 days ago
There has been quite a discussion about bluestones and glacial transport on on Austin Kinsley’s Facebook page, starting on 1st Dec 2019, with many comments from the great and the good. I won't use any names here, because that would make the discussion rather personal, but below we itemise and discuss the seven points initially posted by somebody who presumes to know quite a lot about Stonehenge and about the supposed human transport of the bluestones. As we know from our ongoing discussions over the years, on and off this blog, there are still people out there who are prepared to... more »
The Stonehenge sandstone bluestones
BRIAN JOHN at Stonehenge and the Ice Age - 5 days ago
To summarise the contents of earlier posts, I am now convinced that in the Stonehenge debitage (as explored in excavations across about 50% of the ground area within the stone settings) there are traces of at least four different sandstones. Although Ixer and his colleagues are understandably reluctant to admit this, the evidence presented in their "sandstone" papers does NOT suggest one Devonian sandstone source and one Lower Palaeozoic source for bluestone material at Stonehenge. We still do not know where the Altar Stone came from, or stump 40g, or stump 42c. Mill Bay a... more »
Welsh Ordovician (?) sandstones at Stonehenge
BRIAN JOHN at Stonehenge and the Ice Age - 5 days ago
*This is the biggest chunk of Lower Palaeozoic sandstone yet found at Stonehenge. Photo courtesy Rob Ixer.* In a previous post I looked at the evidence for the provenances of the "Stonehenge sandstone bluestones" (including the Altar Stone) which appear to be of Devonian age. Let's now take a look at the evidence for the provenancing of other sandstone fragments that appear to be much older -- from the Lower Palaeozoic. See this too: https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/search?q=The+petrography,+geological+age+and+distribution+of+the+Lower+Palaeozoic+Sandstone+debitage+from+the... more »
Knock and lochan terrain -- the Teifi Pools again
In a post the other day about the Teifi Pools area, I showed some shots of the landscape and described it as typical of areas of areal scouring close to -- or beneath -- the ice shed of either an ice sheet or an ice cap. In the case of the Teifi Pools the ice shed during the Devensisn glaciation -- and probably others as well -- migrated back and forth over a distance of maybe 20 miles, but the map below (by7 Henry Patton and others) shows its approximate position: The white-coloured "spine" down the centre of the ice cap shows the highest part of the ice dome, possibly the area o... more »
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