 Mae'r cyfnod askwm yn ysgawr i gweithio hefyd, yn ymgyrch i gyd... ...ynd i'n gweithio gwybod a'r gynnodwch ar gyfer sy'n gweithio... ...eg cesai yn rhoi'r cyfnod i adrodd cymotref peidigoedd ym dwylo... ...yna gynnwys ar gyfer y gweithgo, ac mae'n ei effeithio eich cyfnod... ...m tenseau'r ysgawr i chi'r prifael y cyfnod i gael cael eu roi gymryd... ...og yn lawer i chi, mae'n ei chynghau. Fe oedd unrhyw bryd eich sefynt ddechrau'r ddweud â'r ddysgu'r eifernig o'r ddysgu'r eifernig, ac mae'n maesodol o'r ddodol. A dyma gydigodd y ffordd yma gydig o'r ddodol o'r ddodol o'r pêl Gruff Gŵr of 2007, oed yn gyfgwrdd i ddodol o'r ddodol o'r ddodol, wrth i hynny sy'n gymhrein yn ymgyrch, ac mae'r ddodol o'r ddodol o'r ddodol o'r ddodol o'r ddodol. Felly, mae'n eich cyfnod o'r dda, rydyn ni'n gwybod gyda'r dda'r dda i'r rhesaith. Felly, mae'r dda i dda i'r ffrindiau a dda i'r llwydd i'r gwybod. Felly, mae'n ddin cyhoedd Sarson Stone, yn cyfnod o'r dda chi'n cyfnod o'r dda i'r dda i'r nioleth i'r Gwyrdd. Mae'n gweld i'r dda i'r dda i'r dda i'r dda i Bryd a'r Stonhenge. Dwi'n gwybod i'r Dda i'r Stonhenge, dwi'n gychwyn fwych yn cyfnodol, a'r styniaeth gweithio ymddindd bros mwynol sydd yn cyfnod arbennig. Mae'r sason styniaeth er mwynol sefydliadau sydd hwn yn cyfnod ambeithio rhai hynny. Rydym yn cynnig ysgolion sydd yn cael ei fodisi gyblau mewn biograffu yn eich hun, ac mae'n cael eu swyddfa arfer o rai lyw, ac mae'n cael eu gwpa sydd a'r mwyaf. So byddwn i gyd ymgrifion y 17th oed a ddau'r perci addurau? at Sarsen's Stone and how it's been seen since then up to the present day. And I want to do this because I think it's essential to explore Sarsen's role in archaeological discourse before going back to examine its poorly explored roles in prehistory and especially in the Neolithic where archaeologists haven't really looked at it very much as a stone in its own right. It's been used in many different ways in prehistory, but except for a few notable examples, archaeologists have commonly treated it as a mundane or a local stone. So I want to ask how has Sarsen's Stone been vocal and how has it been silent in our study of it? So the persistence of stone is an archaeological benefit, but it's also a problem for us. We have to acknowledge that the lack of biodegradable material culture has an impact on our interpretations of the past. Stone is a dependable material. It's usually the most persistent factor in the archaeological record, but even stone can dematerialise. Stone disappears much faster than it took to form. It's used, it's reused, it's moved, it's replaced, it's taken away, sometimes really quickly and sometimes over really long periods of time. Stone provides us with some of the earliest evidence of our ancestral humanity in, for example, the Old Darwin tools. But stone comes with caveats. The very mutability of stone, which is an advantage to the flint napper, who can remake and renew a stone tool, confuses any archaeological analysis that doesn't account for morphological dynamics. Perhaps the ultimate expression of the mutability of stone as a material is in the destructive, reductive nature of the material's genesis, so quarrying. The discovery, the selection, the extraction and the working of stone removes most of what constitutes the substance of our human engagement with it as a raw material. Quaring destroys all the evidence that went before of the previous quaring of the previous quaring. And I think the ability of stone to persist is bound up in its material properties and some stone types are potentially very much more durable than others. The most durable have a chance to speak with us today and Sarsenstone, the little bit that I've been handing around is exceptionally durable. Both as a material out in the field, a raw material and also as an object when Sarsen's been used in something, it's incredibly durable. And as a stone, it epitomises Michael Shank's answer to the question that he posed back in 1998 when he asked, of what time is an archaeological find? And he concluded then that a find isn't of one time, but it's of all the events in its life cycle. Now Sarsenstone is really durable. So all the associations, all the evocations that have gathered around it over the years, which are at the heart of its agential qualities, have played and they still play a significant role in the antiquary and the archaeological and the social discourse that's created the past of the places where Sarsen is found. And this is a deliberately slightly fuzzy rendering of where Sarsenstone is found in southern Britain. Because there's so much work that still needs to be done really to work out just where this is geologically speaking. But it's a silcrete. Silcretes are found on every continent except Antarctica and Britain has two main types, Sarsenstones and Puddingstones. And it's Britain's youngest stone. It formed when silica-rich groundwater passed through sandy, silty, pebbly deposits in the tertiary beds and it was irregularly cemented. So you can see from this map that there are huge quantities of this type of stone on the chalk and a very large blob of it up here, a huge amount in North Wiltshire, the county where we find Avery and Stonehenge and it just lies about on the surface. It's incredibly dense, incredibly hard, it's resistant to erosion and those properties have been experienced by people and it's those experiences through this geobiography that I'm going to outline. Sarsenstone's particular material qualities really stand out as a common thread in all the things that people have said about it since the earliest inquiries into the stone and I want to pick up on two particular points. So first, the story that Sarsenstone is too hard to be cut by metal tools, a story that dates back to 1540. And the second point is that Sarsenstone was really seen as an oddity. It was totally unconnected to the soils and the underlying geology where it's found. This was something that was observed from very early on. It looks like this, this is a dry valley on chalk downland in North Wiltshire in Southern Britain and it really looks like it does not belong to the soft chalk that's underneath and that goes a very long way down. If you dig a pit, if you dig a shaft like some of the Bronze Age shafts into the chalk it goes a long, long way. So this type of stone has to be explained, it's really odd scattered about in the landscape. So Christopher Wren, so Christopher Wren, thought that Sarsenstones had been thrown out of a volcano onto the chalk and then William Stuclie, this antiquarian in 1743, thought that the really dense stones had been forced out of the soft chalk by the centrifugal force of the rotating earth. Another antiquarian 50 years later called Danes Barrington proposed that there had been some massive earthquake many miles away and exploded the stones out and they landed on the surface. So these stones are really full of energy, they're just like sarsens in folklore as well that are alive and an example of a living stone in local folklore is this stone, it's the Swindon stone. It's about four times taller than me. It's a huge stone, really ways, I don't know how much it's immense and every night when midnight strikes in the village church in the clock this stone walks across the road, it crosses the road every night at midnight. So this is a sarsenstone that has senses, it can hear, it responds to a stimulus, it makes a decision and it takes action, it does something and it does it repeatedly. And sarsenstones are also known as breeding stones, they produce offspring and these offspring get in the way of plowing, they cause trouble to farmers. So they have attributes of the living, they affect the behaviour of people around them. But in this area, in this part of the country, it's the only really hard rock and so it's been used as a building stone for a very long time. Even though it's been used in churches for example for hundreds of years, in 1847 this stone became threatened because two people, Thomas Free and his brother Edward who lived in another county Buckinghamshire which is close to London, they moved to Wiltshire and decided that they were going to bring their skills cutting sarsenstone to Wiltshire and make their fortune perhaps. Families living in Buckinghamshire just outside London had developed skills and knowledge and a special set of tools to cut sarsenstone. And so when they came to Wiltshire, these sarsens were like the dodos on Mauritius or giant tortoises on Galapagos. Between the 1840s and the 1930s for about 80 years thousands of tons of stone were split up for building, for curbs, for sets for street furniture to supply newly growing towns. And areas were almost completely cleared of stones. So on this map the sarsenstones are the speckles, they're mapped by the Ordnance Survey. And by the time 100 years later the new map was made this is what it looked like. When sarsenstone is broken you can see it's vivid white interior and out on the hills all these broken boulders and bits left as waste were gleaming white and local people feared that soon they'd all be gone it would all have disappeared. So in 1907 a group got together to make an appeal to raise some money to buy ground where the sarsens survived. So they were responding to the associations and to the evocations of sarsenstone. They drew on all of those feelings and were successful in getting an appeal to preserve some of the stones. The trouble is sarsenstone had been failing, had been failing in the field but had been failing in the archaeological imagination as well. And most of the literature at this time is about the geology, it's about the science. It's not about the folklore anymore, it's not really even about the archaeology and the archaeologists ignored it. The stones, because of the the grown geological understanding of the rock, became boulders of sand frozen in silica cement. And in the archaeological literature they're mineral resources, they're something to be exploited, they're a nuisance in the landscape to be dealt with by the first farmers. They don't have any life in them anymore. And a typical example is the archaeological preoccupation with where stone hinges sarsens came from. The only thing that's really written about stone hinges sarsens stones, despite the fact that they're so important to the monument, is like where are they from? We just want to know where are they from. So Richard Atkinson in 1956 and 60 years later Mike Parker Pearson in 2016, all they're concerned with, what's the route? Where's the line on the map? Sarsenstone's been treated as a local stone, it's just convenient, that's all we're interested in. And even worse than that, it's become a dead stone. So reading the persistence of stone as a certain or absolute component of its materiality, Mike Parker Pearson has interpreted stone hinges stones as the home of the ancestors. In his argument, durable stone transcends perishable human life, it resists lively and animated meanings. You have to ask, well why use a particular stone in a monument? If you could just use any stone because stone is dead and stone is cold, why use a particular type of stone? The communication of the kind of feelings and ideas that people have about a particular stone that have come from Sarsenstone's long life cycle, they're absent from a theory like Mike Parker Pearson's. But Sarsenstone's live, they breathe, they even perspire, they're known for their propensity to sweat. They provide homes and living spaces, for example these are really rare lichens, they only grow on Sarsenstone as a really special environment and the stones are part of an ecosystem and they're fought over. So in March 2001, there were local protests about a team of archaeologists who tried to break a Sarsenstone using 18th century techniques. It was for a TV programme and those local people who complained and said this is outrageous, you shouldn't do this, they were drawn to the stone because of this long life, because of these associations and these evocations, it's rich and varied life history and it's power to interact with people. So just to conclude, Tim Ingle claims that materials lie low but are never entirely subdued and I think Sarsenstone is the ultimate expression of the impossibility of subduing a material. The ways that it's been experienced in the past shape the stories that have been told about it and they continue to influence what it tells us today. So thank you for listening.