Thanks Brian, some thought-provoking ideas in your videos.
If the blue stones were carried by the Irish Sea Glacier, has any work been done (geologically rather than archaeologically, I guess) to work out where the position "west of Salisbury Plain" was? It still seems unusual that the bluestones that ended up at Stonehenge and other nearby monuments represent all the bluestones carried by the glacier. In other cases where glacial erratics are commonplace, they tend to be of many different shapes and sizes and there must have been some that didn't fit into the requirements of local monument builders.
Also (and I'm sure someone will have considered this previously) are there any other monuments elsewhere in the west of England that make use of bluestone dolorite? Most of the monuments in that part of the country tend to make use of various types of limestone (e.g. oolite) or sandstone. Not that this point is conclusive either way, but if bluestone was considered worth carting from Wales to Salisbury, wouldn't other, more local (en-route) monument builders have wanted to make use of it? Conversely of course you might expect a glacier to dump some other bits off along its course.
More questions than answers, me.
|