 Hello everyone! First, let me apologise for not being with you in person. Unfortunately, I have an unavoidable work commitment, and I can't travel to Barcelona. Think of me working in Northern England, where it is probably raining. I'm Katie Whitaker, a PhD student at the University of Reading. My contact details are at the end of the presentation, so please get in touch. Our session abstract asks us to raise methodological and theoretical issues in the study of rock-hewn sites and quarries. I'm taking this opportunity to consider problems that I'm grappling with in the study of a quarry in South East England. This slide will give you an idea about the area. You can see in the bottom right hand map the great variety of solid geology here. The most of this is Cretaceous, Tertiary and Quaternary, spanning about 145 million years. I will introduce you to the specific stone type that I'm studying, some of its uses over time, and its quarry. There are numerous methodological problems in studying this stone, which I will illustrate through two case studies. These also show how important it is to critically evaluate our theoretical approaches to the archaeology. First, I want to take a moment to think about where and when the quarry is. If you are using the concept of the Chain Operatoire to investigate utilised stone, you must consider the procurement of the raw material. This applies not only to flint, chert and other napped materials in prehistory where the idea comes from. It can be applied to studies of stone use of all periods. For example, although transportation costs were usually the most expensive thing about building with stone in the Middle Ages, much of the 14th to 16th century fabric of Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, was built in Ulitic limestone shipped from Dundry quarry near Bristol in England. Identifying this source starts to reveal the extended network around the cathedral and suggests that reasons other than economy were important to its designers and builders. How will you locate the quarry source of your stone? And what will that suggest about past human or hominid behaviour? Sometimes it is very obvious where the quarry is, but they are very varied places. They can be giant pits like this one at Della Bowl in southwest England. They have characteristic forms with stepped sides, quarry faces, access routes and infrastructure for the quarrymen and to connect the quarry to a wide supply network. Quarries can be hidden, like the stone mines at Beer also in the southwest of England. Here the large chambers where stone has been removed since the Roman period are underground. They are reached by narrow addits and tunnels. Jet has been a much valued stone since the Neolithic. In Britain it is found in the sea cliffs of northeast England. Unlike quarry pits and underground chambers, it is much harder to identify where jet was taken from. The locations are more scattered and ephemeral, destroyed as the sea changes the shoreline. Although we may be able to locate quarries, when were those sites being exploited? They have often been used for many hundreds of years. Two problems arise. Firstly, traditional quarrying techniques using manual labour and hand tools have lasted for a very long time. Medieval techniques do not necessarily look any different to say 18th century methods. Secondly, as the quarry is used, past evidence for stone extraction is destroyed. For example, stone was taken from the ravine of the Chillmark quarry in Wiltshire in the Neolithic and Roman periods. However, all we have today are a few pieces of stone that those people used. All the evidence of their quarrying activity was destroyed when huge quantities of stone was extracted to supply Salisbury Cathedral in the 13th century. Notably, we can use geochemical analyses and patrology to source rock types. For example, this has been very successful in research to identify the south Wales sources of Stonehenge's bluestones. The rock outcrop shown in this aerial photograph was identified through geochemistry as one of the sources for stones at Stonehenge. And excavations from 2011 to 2015 have revealed the Neolithic quarry face here. Locating the quarry and identifying its age are particularly difficult for the types of rock that I'm studying. Let me introduce you to Sarsenstone. Sarsenstone is a silcrete, a salicified sandstone. Cobbles and boulders of it were formed at different times in the past when silica-rich groundwater flowed through sand and pebble beds, differentially cementing the clasts together. Archaeologists tend to describe two types. The coarser Sakeroid Sarsen here on the left and finer grained Quartzite Sarsen. Because Sarsenstone is usually more than 97% silica, it is extremely hard and tough. In the thin section shown in this slide, you can see the small quartz sand grains supported by the silica matrix. You might be able to spot a few very tiny specks of colour here and there, showing that there are a few other minerals in the mix, but these are a very tiny percentage. In Britain, Sarsenstone is scattered on the surface, like this spread of boulders lying in a valley in Wiltshire. Sometimes the boulders are shallowly buried in quaternary deposits. They are available here and there over a very wide area across southeast England. This is why I call this an ephemeral quarry. There are no deep pits or underground quarry chambers. Sarsenstone is not limited to one outcrop. Sarsen boulders have been used since prehistory, like the dolmen on the left, Devil's Den, right up to the present day, like these street sets on the right. Thinking about that dolmen and those street sets, now think back to the Shane Operatoire and the importance of locating stone procurement to interpret human behaviour. My first problem is that Sarsenstones are not mapped. They are not bedrock geology, and although they are associated with recent superficial deposits, they themselves are older. They don't fit in with traditional geological mapping. This map is the best currently available to show where sarsens can be found, and so where they might have been quarried. Well, it's not entirely accurate, is it? In another attempt to find where Sarsenstone is available, I have counted the number of times the word sarsen appears in published volumes describing local geology. In Britain, each geological map sheet has an accompanying book to explain the details. Although sarsenstone isn't on the maps, it does get mentioned in the books. But this is also very general and far too small scale to be much use. How can I choose where to begin to find the sources of sarsenstone exploited over the past 4,000 years? For the rest of my time today, I'm going to look at these methodological problems and explain how the issues are ultimately theoretical problems too through two brief case studies. Firstly, let us turn to Stonehenge, which stands in an area with a few sarsenstones, but many more on the hills and valleys to the north. The biggest stones at Stonehenge, making the trilathons and the lintel stone circle, are all sarsens. The theory is that these boulders were taken from a source about 40 kilometres to the north of the site. This idea was first written down and published in the 16th century. This theory has stuck for more than 500 years. In 1956, Professor Atkinson suggested the transportation route sketched on the map on the left. And 60 years later, Professor Parker Pearson suggested this slightly different route drawn on the right. But we know from the general distribution map that sarsen is available over a much wider area of southeast England. Could Stonehenge's sarsenstones have come from further away? After all, other stone types have been moved considerable distances to Stonehenge in prehistory, like the South Wales bluestones. The problem is both theoretical and methodological. Archaeologists have tended to take a practical and common sense view. Those huge sarsen stones must have come from a nearby local source. But this denies the agency of the people selecting and transporting the stones and the agency of the stones themselves. Why were particular stones chosen? And could they not include sarsens from further afield? We know that some of the stone circles on Orkney in Scotland include different types of stone from different quarries. But methodologically, it's very difficult to test this idea. Remember that photomicrograph of the sarsen thin section? Sarsen doesn't have the varied geochemistry that could fingerprint a source accurately. Sarsen stones are most famous for their uses in prehistoric stone circles at Evbury and Stonehenge, and in funerary monuments like the West Kennet Longbarrow or Weyland-Smithy. But this ephemeral quarry has been exploited right up to the present day. For my second case study, let me tell you a story about 19th century England. 1840s, two brothers, living about 40 kilometres northwest of London, were involved in the sarsen cutting industry. Their families dug sarsen stones out of the clay that overlies the chalk hills of this area. They turned the clay into bricks, and they cut up the sarsen boulders using a set of specialist steel tools. Most of the stone was turned into sets to pave the streets of neighbouring towns. These two young men decided to try their luck elsewhere. The family story goes that they had heard sarsen stones lay about on the surface in Wiltshire, where the boulders had been used in prehistory to build monuments like Stonehenge, of course. So they travelled about 70 kilometres to the west and set up business. They moved from the area shown in the top right of the slide to the area circled in the middle. And this is one of the places where they came. In theory, life would be easier for the two brothers. They wouldn't have to dig the stone out of the ground. After they trained a few locals how to select and split the boulders using wedges, their small business would be more profitable because it was less labour intensive. This is the family story of Enos and Edward Free. Their sarsen cutting business was a success. Large quantities of the stone were broken up and removed from Wiltshire, especially in the area close to the stone circles at Avebury. But the story raises various theoretical and methodological issues. Let's look at two. Firstly, although the business is documented as removing large quantities of sarsen stone between about 1850 and 1930, most of the archaeological evidence is for failure. Thousands of sarsen boulders, like the one in the slide, are scattered around the countryside. They are partially cut or attempts were made to cut them and then they were abandoned. In this slide, you can see half the boulder at the bottom of the photograph has been taken away and wedge holes that were abandoned when the stone was left. We can also see from the documentary evidence that the men involved in this trade had a variety of jobs. The stone quarrying and cutting was not their only source of income. Furthermore, we can see that their families travelled to and fro, visiting their old home at different times. For example, some of their children were born at the old home close to London, whilst some were born at the new quarries. Combining the archaeological evidence with the documentary sources suggests that this was a more contingent existence. It was highly networked and it was more fluid than the straightforward common sense and capitalistic history of the quarry that has been written so far. Secondly, the areas that these families worked overlap with the areas traditionally viewed as the source for Stonehenge's sarsens and other prehistoric monuments. At least 750 sarsen stones were used to build the circles and avenues at nearby Avebury, for example. Both prehistoric and more recent extraction used manual labour and hand tools. Is it possible to tell the difference between a stone hollow left in prehistory and one left by the 19th century stonecutters? In this presentation, I've raised questions rather than talks about possible solutions. I would have loved to discuss this area with you to think about how to work in an ephemeral, scattered quarry where quarrying from different periods overlaps. Perhaps the answer lies in very close field survey, which I will be trying this winter. I'm sorry I couldn't be with you today, but here are my contact details if you would like to get in touch. Thank you very much for listening.