Jonathan Jones thinks the Hajj “one of the most brilliant exhibitions the British Museum has put on”. I often agree with what he writes, and I’m looking forward to seeing the show, though as I’d suspected that will have to be next week. Meanwhile, here’s a story about an English man who went to Mecca. He’s called Joseph Pitts (a likely relative, but unproven – hence “great uncle”). He is the first known English citizen to have made that journey, in around 1685, having, by his account, converted to Islam under torture.

He wrote one of those wonderful travel books when he was back in England, typically done by people we would never otherwise have heard of who ended up in some corner of the world in ways they had never planned. Another such is William Mariner, who wrote about Tonga in 1817, as I mentioned elsewhere on this blog. My friends Mike Parker Pearson and Karen Godden wrote a book about Robert Drury, who was shipwrecked in Madagascar and wrote about it in 1729.

Joseph called his story A True & Faithful Account of the Religion & Manners of the Mohametans, published in 1704. Little is known about the man, and until now the best report was a short 1920 paper by Cecily Radford (image above). Soon we will have Paul Auchterlonie’s Encountering Islam: Joseph Pitts: An English Slave in 17th-Century Algiers & Mecca, the first modern critical study of Joseph’s book.

And what a book! It begins with his capture. He was about 16 when a fishing ship he was working on, approaching Spain on her way back from Newfoundland, knew she was entering waters plagued by pirates. Yet the crew could do almost nothing about it. One morning the mate watching out from the top masthead spotted a sail in the distance. They must have known what it was as it slowly caught up. Around midday the ship was nearly upon them, and they decided they had no option but to surrender. So they hauled up their sails and waited.

The pirates took what they wanted (mostly just the men), and sunk the English ship. But that wasn’t the end of it. Over the next 10 days or so, a further three English ships and one Dutch one were captured and treated in the same way. So when they finally made land in Algeria, there were some 30 would-be slaves to market.

You can imagine why people who survived such experiences, with the right education and contacts back home, were persuaded to write about them.

I’m mentioning this here partly because so little is known about Joseph Pitts, and maybe we’ll be able to unearth some new information. His father John was a nonconformist, and Joseph was one of several children born in Exeter around 1662. He’s said to have been baptised at James’s Meeting (but the records are lost) and buried in Free Cemetery at Friernhay (where there are also no relevant records). If an undated will has been correctly identified, he married a woman called Hannah, they had at least two children, including Elizabeth who married a Mr Skutt, and he died around 1739. I’ve known about Joseph for some time, but only now have I started to look into his history – and excitingly with the help of an old friend may already have tracked down Elizabeth Skutt. We shall see.

Dropped into the British Museum on my way back from another Stonehenge meeting yesterday in London (of which more anon), and took these fuzzy photos with my phone. There must have been some interesting discussions in the early days of organising the Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam exhibition, not least about the sponsor HSBC and exactly what to stock in the shop. These black cubes on the floor are gorgeous, and make a lovely contrast with the great Grayson Perry pot in the hanging behind. The exhibition must be quite unlike Perry’s, yet his too is a spiritual thing, and it would be interesting to see the one after the other (possible until February 19 when The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman closes). Much looking forward to the press view of Hajj next week, if I can make it (dangerously close to the magazine’s going to press day).

The John Lewis Christmas TV ad came in for some stick as well as praise. I loved it so much I was tempted to rush to the keyboard the hour it was first aired. Today’s announcement of JL’s record-breaking Christmas sales (they got it right, then), gives me the excuse to write a quick note now.

This was an advert hoping to make us spend money at someone’s shop. Any criticism that forgot that entirely missed the point. You might as well complain that a polar bear kills seals or a traffic warden gives out parking tickets: that’s what they’re designed to do, and the way to judge them is to ask how well they do those tasks.

So we had a clever story told well, filmed beautifully and set to almost Schubertian piano playing with Amelia Warner/Slow Moving Millie’s version of a Smiths’ song. What was there not to like? If you were a Smiths’ fan, you should have been celebrating. I was introduced to Bach – entertainingly mangled by Jacques Lousier – by Collett Dickenson Pearce’s Hamlet cigar adverts when I was 12 (if you don’t know them, watch the lot here). Bach has been with me ever since, almost every day.

To pick out just one thing I haven’t seen commented on, I liked the cut from the clock pendulum to the swing, reminiscent of the flying bone cut in 2001, one of my favourite films. But what I most liked about the ad was simply that it understood its customers – you only get ads this good when client and creatives work together well. So let’s celebrate the people who made it, among them Craig Inglis (marketing director, John Lewis), Lloyd Page (head of marketing/brand) and creative agency Adam and Eve.

It didn’t hit you over the head with its products or prices, but soothed you into a world that was made entirely of John Lewis, artefacts barely on screen whose presence really came to life only when you visited a store. It was an ad that could have been designed by Danny Miller, an embodiment of his thesis in The Comfort of Things: we are shaped by the stuff around us, and we use artefacts to create who we are.

I found this nice little drawing in an antique market in Hungerford yesterday. It’s by Henry Hunt, Canadian First Nations artist who lived on Vancouver Island (1923–85). I’m largely guessing here, but it looks like a decorative greetings card or souvenir that he might have produced as a cheap purchase for his art shop in Victoria in the 70s. It shows an eagle with a toothy salmon in its claws (a common spring sight in many parts of British Columbia), in the traditional style that Bill Holm described in his Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965).

Henry Hunt was among a line of artists who did much to record and revive Kwakwaka’wakw art and culture in BC. His grandfather was George Hunt (1854–1933), a key figure in this field who provided the anthropologist Franz Boas with important material, collecting and recording huge quantities of artefacts and stories. His sons Richard Hunt, Stanley Hunt and Tony Hunt are also notable carvers and artists, and his daughter Shirley Ford is a button blanket maker; his grandsons Jason Hunt, Tony Hunt Jnr and Trevor Hunt, among others in the family, are continuing the tradition with carvings and paintings.

Henry became a principal carver at the BC Provincial Museum in Victoria, after apprenticeship with Arthur Shaunnesy and his father-in-law, Mungo Martin. Some prominent memorial poles are among his work, including one in Hertfordshire! This was apparently commissioned in the 1960s by a grateful lumberman from Berkhamstead, whose brother had been saved from starvation by the Kwakwaka’wakw community in Tahsis. It was erected at the timber mill in England in 1968, and now stands in a housing estate. There are around a dozen of these poles in Britain, striking pieces of art that often have fascinating stories attached as to how and why they were carved, and ended up here.

Here’s another of Henry Hunt’s drawings, an eagle and wildwoman (1973) from the Coghlan Art website.

All that from a card bought for a couple of quid!

The booklet that accompanied the launch of Henry Moore’s Stonehenge Suite, consisting of 15 lithographs and, in an extended edition, 16 lithographs and two etchings, all with this etching on the title page, in 1974. Altogether 100 sets were printed, before the lithographic images were removed from the stones and the etching plates cancelled. This book also features a preliminary drawing, and an introduction by Stephen Spender. Happy new year everyone!

A further Stonehenge inquiry took place this year, looking at the possible closure of some roads and paths. This morning Wiltshire Council announced that it has accepted the inspector’s recommendations, so another stage towards improving visitor facilities and the landscape around Stonehenge has been passed. I found some of the proceedings difficult to follow, so I had a word with someone at English Heritage, who was very helpful. Here is what happened as I see it.

The key thing is that road changes have been approved, including grassing over the road closest to the stones (part of the A344), allowing construction of the new visitor centre and facilities to go ahead, with a projected opening late in 2013. However, not everything the proponents asked for was granted, and some issues that are unlikely to go away will need to be resolved later down the line.

English Heritage had asked for the A344 closure, which was something the Department for Transport had to respond to. It also wanted to straighten the road north of Airman’s Corner as part of improving the safety of that dangerous junction, which will incorporate access to the new centre when it is done. This is known as a “stopping up order”, and the government agreed to it on October 31 (see map).

The other part of this vision had been proposed by Wiltshire Council, which by a quirk of law is the authority with powers to make such a suggestion, and is also empowered to take the decision. This proposal (a “road traffic order”, or RTO) created so much public concern, the council decided to distance itself and extend the public inquiry. The aim was to cut down general road traffic within the world heritage site, especially on routes that remain unmetalled – including Byway 12, a track that passes close to Stonehenge, crossing nearby archaeological sites at the Cursus to the north and barrows on Overton Down to the south (see map). It sounds straightforward, but it generated the sort of debate we’ve seen at previous Stonehenge inquiries: a mix of elegant thought, chaos, irrelevance and incomprehension, and sometimes just sheer boredom. In other words, it’s as fascinating as all the others.

The inspector, Alan Boyland (who had also reported on the stopping up order), decided that it would be a good thing to close the A344 between Stonehenge and Airman’s Corner to everyday traffic, but a bad thing to do the same to byways (“byways open to all traffic”, or BOATs). The latter was not what Wiltshire Council or English Heritage, or indeed some of the respondents to the inquiry, had hoped for. But it will have pleased many, including some Druids and Pagans, and off-road driving campaigners.

But the celebrations may be short lived (in Stonehenge terms, anyway). Some of the objections came from people who want to drive off-road vehicles through the world heritage site (and some, it might seem, from those who want to uphold the principle that anyone can drive wherever they like). Others, including many of the Pagans, came from people who want to park close to Stonehenge. These are quite different things, and both are problematic.

Firstly, the inspector upheld the right of people to drive along the byways. It might be “convenient and practical” for the likes of Wiltshire Council and English Heritage, who seek to improve the environment, to stop the driving, he said. But it would not be “suitable and appropriate”. He was not persuaded that “the gain to the overall amenity of the WHS would outweigh the loss of amenity of motorised users”.

That’s fair enough, but it is a conclusion that brings problems. The RTO was being sought because the principles are enshrined in the world heritage site management plan. This was created in 2000, after huge public consultation and debate, was revised and updated after more consultation in 2009, and is endorsed by national government (the Department for Culture, Media & Sport) – it is “a material consideration in planning decisions”. It cannot just be ignored. Policy 5c (there are over 40 policies of this type, listed under the headline Action Plan) reads:

“Vehicular access to Byways within the World Heritage Site should be restricted apart from access for emergency, operational and farm vehicles.”

Casual short-term parking close to Stonehenge on Byway 12

Secondly, the inspector did not say that people had a right to park their vehicles on byways. He noted that near Stonehenge, Byway 12 “is frequently used for casual short-term parking” (there were 15–20 vehicles there yesterday, several looking rather long-term). But, he asked, “Is there a right to park on a BOAT?” No, he said. “The public right… is a right of passage”. While “a number of incidental uses may not be unlawful… [such as] temporary parking… this would not be a right in itself.”

So in both cases – driving and parking – there are going to be problems in future. This is partly because the continuing use of Byway 12 in these ways after the other changes have occurred, would be likely to become more intensive (as was seen briefly earlier this year when the A344 was temporarily closed at Stonehenge); partly it will be more disruptive to the majority of Stonehenge visitors, who would then otherwise be seeing the stones in a landscape devoid of car parks and normal road traffic (apart from that on the A303); and partly it will be much more dangerous, with access to the byway only from the fast moving and very busy A303.

And that’s very briefly summarising a huge mass of evidence, argument and review.

Just back from a cold and grey Stonehenge, talking to an ITV crew about the bluestone story I wrote about in my last blog: there should be something on ITV news bulletins tonight.

As I was driving down thinking about it, it struck me that one of the really interesting aspect of this research is the fact that all the samples of rock matched to Pont Saeson come from chips and flakes (debitage), and not from megaliths. What does this mean?

One of the distinctive features of the rhyolitic rocks is that they are flinty – they have a good conchoidal fracture. That makes them relatively easy to break up, if they are standing as monoliths at Stonehenge. But it also makes them pretty good for making tools, or portable artefacts of some kind. There are plenty of flaked bluestone “tools” in museum collections from Stonehenge (some of them from my own dig, as illustrated above, from my PPS report). Which of these are made from debris created when stones were dressed on site? Which are made from broken up megaliths? And which were made in Wales and brought to Stonehenge by people visiting, perhaps on a pilgrimage of some kind? Clearly the distinction has important implications for how we understand Stonehenge.

These are questions that future research can answer, through excavation in Wales and at Stonehenge and study of the debris – that we can do this is a reflection of the quality and utility of the new research. Ixer and Bevins identified five groups of rock amongst the rhyolitic pieces they studied, of which three (by far the bulk of all they saw) they have matched to the Pont Saeson outcrops. There is one buried stump at Stonehenge (stone 32e) that they say could well be from Pont Saeson (to be confirmed), but the four standing rhyolitic stones are different. One of the latter (stone 48) belongs to one of the two very rare classes that Ixer and Bevins identified, which have yet to be matched to a source. One way excavation at Stonehenge would help us, is in allowing modern identification of the stumps and other bits of megaliths at the site.

Just before I set out to Stonehenge, I emailed Ixer to ask how to pronounce “Pont Saeson”. Was it Sayson or Season? He replied that Bevins always calls it Sigh-son. So now we know. (I got his message after the interview, so I used the more specific Craig Rhos-y-felin!)

One of a few things I said that probably won’t make it on air, but interesting nonetheless, are these figures, which I worked out long ago. If we imagine a complete Stonehenge (itself debatable, especially for the sarsen circle), the total weight of rock at the site would have been around 2,000 tonnes. Most of this (some 85%) was sarsen. But if you calculate tonnes/kilometre, based on assumptions about where the sources were, these two rock categories work out about the same, at 50–60,00 tonne/km. All sorts of factors complicate the issue (the sheer bulk of the big sarsens brings exceptional logistical problems, while the shorter distance would have been far less problematic than having to come from Pembrokeshire; most sarsens are likely to have been brought to the site in one go, while bluestone may – or may not – have arrived in different episodes; etc). But it’s this sort of thinking that we need more of, we need to understand the practical Stonehenge as well as the things that are impossible to know, such as why it’s there.

Norman Hammond’s piece in Today’s Times (“Bluestones theory is now frozen out”) highlights the work by Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer on the precise origins of the Stonehenge bluestones. This is landmark stuff, and worth trying, briefly, to summarise.

There’s a lot of stone debris under the ground at Stonehenge, and more in the area around. For much of the 20th century the former was known as the “Stonehenge layer”. William Hawley associated it with the original dressing of megaliths (hence, any pits found below it were said to be older than the standing stones), while Richard Atkinson thought it derived from destruction of the stones, and was largely post-medieval or modern. As I found at my small excavation on the roadside in 1980, at least some of this debris almost certainly is prehistoric. At the time, I claimed it was contemporary with the carving of the stones. Mike Parker Pearson and Tim Darvill would now like to associate it with prehistoric stone destruction; on available evidence, I think it’s impossible to be certain either way. However, while the debris across the site is likely to have a variety of different origins, most of it, at least, probably does come from stones used for megaliths. So it’s an extremely important resource for understanding Stonehenge.

At last, we have some substantial modern studies of this material. Hammond quotes the most recently published, by Ixer and Bevins in Archaeology in Wales. Other articles include theirs in the Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, and one they authored with Nick Pearce in the Journal of Archaeological Science (see references). They bring an important insight: the great bulk of the non sarsen stones at Stonehenge (but not all), come from a very restricted region in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales. So restricted, that Ixer at least is confident in saying that this alone points to human transport as the only likely mechanism for the stones having got to Stonehenge.

The best known type of bluestone is the spotted dolerite, of which all the stones in the surviving inner arrangement at Stonehenge are composed. These are long known to have originated in the Preseli Hills. Ixer and Bevins have also examined specimens of the other main class, rhyolitic tuffs.

The work began principally with a study of the stone fragments picked up on the surface or excavated in test pits near the Cursus, just north of Stonehenge. Though several different types of rhyolitic rock were represented, they found that most “had a restricted and distinctive petrography both in terms of their mineralogy and textures”, and that “this petrography was unusual for south-west Wales, being only recognised from the Pont Saeson area”. In subsequent fieldwork, building on Bevins’s extensive knowledge of the area, they located outcrops at Pont Saeson, in a deep valley on the northern edge of the famous Preseli Hills. In the JAS article, they reported that some rhyolites from Stonehenge were the same as samples from Pont Saeson (on Craig Rhos-y-felin), and further detailed work confirming this is reported in the Archaeology in Wales article. The location is so precise, we have every reason to think that actual quarries should now be found, opening up exciting fieldwork possibilities.

References

“Craig Rhos-Y-Felin, Pont Saeson is the dominant source of the Stonehenge rhyolitic ‘debitage’”, by RA Ixer & RE Bevins, Archaeology in Wales 50 (2011), 21–31

“Stonehenge rhyolitic bluestone sources & the application of zircon chemistry as a new tool for provenancing rhyolitic lithics”, by RE Bevins, NJP Pearce, & RA Ixer, Journal of Archaeological Sciences 38 (2011), 605–22

“The petrography, affinity and provenance of lithics from the Cursus Field, Stonehenge”, by RA Ixer & RE Bevins, Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine 103 (2010) 1–15

“The detailed petrography of six orthostats from the bluestone circle, Stonehenge”, by RA Ixer & RE Bevins, Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine 104 (2010), 1–14

Putting the entire blame on the media industry is wrong, but have to say I had some sympathy with Bidisha when I saw this in last weekend’s Sunday Times.

It’s the headline from page 9 of a 20-page supplement (including ads), called 100 TOP GADGETS. It doesn’t say 100 TOP GADGETS FOR MEN, and one imagines plenty of women would be interested in things like sat navs, radios, computer games, tablets, phones and cameras (etc). Yet there is no “Gadgets for boys” page. The few items on page 9 include a calculator wrapped in chocolate, a woolly hat with speakers and a video memo device doubling as a fridge magnet. The Contents list calls page 9 “The best gadgets for the fairer sex”. What is the editor thinking? Don’t boys like chocolate?

Let’s have a dispassionate look at the latest Stonehenge news. The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project (University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection) continues its geophysical survey. So what’s new?

The press release is titled “Discoveries provide evidence of a celestial procession at Stonehenge”, which is pretty much what all the journalists who reported it said (often just copying the release). It includes a “podflash” interview with Vince Gaffney, and there is a video visualisation of the theory here.

The Independent really went to town, using words like “extraordinary” and “massive”, suggesting the discoveries might “turn the accepted chronology of the Stonehenge landscape on its head”, and that “Stonehenge site’s sacred status is at least 500 years older than previously thought”. The project as a whole is going to “transform scholars’ understanding of the famous monument’s origins, history and meaning”. Golly.

I couldn’t see where all this came from, so I contacted the Birmingham University press office, who very kindly gave me some geophysics plots. As no other news media anywhere as far as I can see had used them, I thought it would be helpful to post them here, which I did. The press office later asked me to replace them with the lower resolution images below, which show pretty much the same thing, though the actual anomalies that are interpreted as prehistoric pits are harder to pick out.

I mostly leave it to others to look at these plots and comment on the interpretations (please do). What I will do here is describe what the Birmingham team found, and add a bit of context.

They pick on two geophysical anomalies, just south of the northern line of the Cursus. Here is the survey on its own:

And this is their interpretation, a triangle connecting the two pits revealed by the survey (at the top), and the Heelstone at Stonehenge (at the bottom):

Seen from the Heelstone, they say, the eastern anomaly is on an alignment towards midsummer sunrise, and the western is on an alignment towards midsummer sunset. (Assuming there are no obstructions, the eastern site is visible from Stonehenge; but the western site, as Gaffney says, cannot be seen, explaining their choice of a burning post in the video representation.)

These anomalies have not been excavated or cored, so we do not know what they are, or how old they are.

Antler from the west end of the Cursus has been dated to 3630–3370BC (1). The earliest known phase at Stonehenge is some five centuries later, at 3015–2935BC. The erection of the Heelstone is undated, but is generally assumed to have taken place at an early stage in the site’s history, perhaps as early as 3000BC – though as my excavation there in 1979 showed, at that date (we’re guessing these dates) the stone may have been standing a little bit north-west of its present site (2).

The press release gives this comment on the two anomalies from Vince Gaffney (project leader from the IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre at the University of Birmingham):

“This is the first time we have seen anything quite like this at Stonehenge and it provides a more sophisticated insight into how rituals may have taken place within the Cursus and the wider landscape. These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important, ritual focus and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date.”

The release also notes “a new horseshoe arrangement of large pits north-east of Stonehenge which may have also contained posts”. No indication is given of which features this refers to.

A “previously unknown gap in the middle of the northern side of the Cursus”, also noted in the press release, sounds like the gap that the English Heritage landscape survey (see below) found in 2010.

There are several other survey projects in the Stonehenge world heritage site, most still in progress.

Stonehenge landscape relationships geophysics survey

In June 2011 this project conducted a geomagnetic survey covering two square kilometres north of the A344, between King Barrow Ridge and Fargo Plantation (largely equivalent to the Birmingham survey area, without the block south of the road). The work was directed by Timothy Darvill (Bournemouth University), and Friedrich Lüth and Andreas Fischer (Römisch-Germanische Kommission, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Frankfurt) with support from Sensys GmbH. Details have not been published.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project geophysics survey

This multi-university field project, responsible for most of the recent excavation in the world heritage site, has a geophysics project directed by Bournemouth University’s Kate Welham. They have surveyed over 5.5 hectares since 2004. Details have not been published.

Stonehenge landscape survey (English Heritage)

This is the first modern detailed survey of the earthworks and other standing remains within the world heritage site – the barrows, field systems and linear ditches, tracks, ponds, recent military remains and so on.

Stonehenge mapping project (English Heritage, part of the National Mapping Programme)

This created a map-based record of everything of archaeological and historic interest that is known about the world heritage site from aerial photos. It added 539 sites to the 2,062 recorded at the start, and continues to be updated.

Stonehenge lidar surveys

Lidar creates a very detailed 3D image of the ground surface using airborne laser imagery, and has revealed subtle new details to known earthworks such as field boundaries. The English Heritage survey is described here and in Antiquity 2005 (3). Wessex Archaeology has an impressive 3D animation using lidar data here, and a zoomable lidar image of the whole world heritage site here.

Stonehenge laser scanning (English Heritage)

This has created a high resolution 3D image of the surfaces of the megaliths, and was done on site in spring 2011.

References

1 “The date of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus”, by Julian Thomas, Peter Marshall, Mike Parker Pearson, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Chris Tilley & Kate Welham, in Antiquity 83 (2009), 40–53

2 “On the Road to Stonehenge: report on the investigations beside the A344 in 1968, 1979 and 1980”, by M Pitts, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 48 (1982), 75–132

3 “New light on an ancient landscape: lidar survey in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site”, by RH Bewley, SP Crutchley & CA Shell, in Antiquity 79 (2005), 636–47