THE BLUESTONE CONTROVERSY

 

The first modern excavations at Stonehenge took place between 1918 and 1926, conducted by William Hawley. Amongst many other features, he excavated a number of the Aubrey Holes, the ring of 56 pits just inside the bank. In the base of each pit was a compacted chalk surface such as might be created by the weight of a heavy object settling into and sitting in the pit.

At first, Hawley was sure that these pits had once housed the bluestones, but  by the time he wrote his final reports, his certainty had disappeared, and he proposed the long-held ambivalence that the pits were either occupied by large stones or wooden posts. One problem was that neither in Hawley's investigations  was any fragment of bluestone recovered from trustworthy contexts in the Aubrey Holes, so the presence of bluestones at this early phase could not be proven.

In the 1950s, Atkinson excavated several more of the Aubrey Holes without coming to any more definite a conclusion. He also investigated a group of pits within the stone circle known as the "Q & R Holes". In these, archaeologists found chips of bluestone, and it was generally accepted that this double arc of pits, with extras by the NE entrance, were created to hold the bluestones. Hawley had found one which was cut by one of the Sarsen holes, and it was deemed that the Q & R setting was slightly earlier than the Sarsen monument. The earliest evidence for the Welsh stones at Stonehenge was therefore considered to be around 2500BC.

In 2008 the Stonehenge Riverside Project re-excavated Aubrey Hole 7 to recover the cremated remains reburied there by Hawley after his work finished. They found an oval impression which Parker-Pearson said had to be a stone impression. At the same time, their investigation of the riverside end of the Avenue brought to light the remains of an early stone circle there (West Amesbury Henge), with chips of bluestones in the demolition levels dating to around 2500BC. It was again suggested that the Bluestones might have arrived in the earliest phase of building at Stonehenge, and that the Q& R setting was in fact a repositioning of the stones removed from the Aubrey Holes and West Amesbury Henge. But when the chips found at the new site proved not to be Preseli bluestones after all, everyone again fell back on the vaguer 'wooden posts or stones' explanation for the Aubrey Holes.

 

Parker Pearson next investigated the quarry sites in the Preseli hills, finding that at least two of them had been in use well before 2500BC, and indeed were several centuries older even than the Aubrey Holes. Work to find a local monument using bluestones from this period was successful, and preliminary dates from a circle excavated at the base of the hills shows that it was demolished (and the stones removed) around 3000BC.

So now we have Bluestone quarries dating to c3200BC, a local circle that was destroyed two centuries later, releasing more than 50 stones for re-use, and a two circles of pits just the right size for them at Stonehenge dating to precisely the same period. It looks enticingly as if Hawley was right all along: if only we could find a few chips of Bluestone in one of the remaining Aubrey Holes ...