A rediscovery in our Museum stores featured in the February 2022 British Archaeology Magazine with an article by Mike Pitts.

Stonehenge must be as thoroughly researched as any ancient site in the world. Yet important evidence can still be found in museum archives.

 

The discovery identified in the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes by director David Dawson, consists of three wallets containing 34 geological thin sections, made for William Cunnington III from specimens collected “from under the turf within the area of the [Stonehenge] building” between 1876 and 1881. Though known to have been made, they were thought lost. They are of considerable interest to geologists, as few such early collections remain extant. They also hold important new clues about the nature of the bluestones, the small megaliths at Stonehenge mostly sourced in Wales.

 

The samples allow new descriptions of three stones. Numbers 32 and 61a are dolerite. Because thin sections cannot be analysed geochemically, the slides add to existing characterisations without changing them. Stone 32c, however, had not been scientifically studied before. It can now be allocated to “Andesite Group A”, say Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins, which they had previously defined using broken debris alone. It is the first megalith – and the slide is now the type specimen – to be scientifically assigned to this large group of material to which four other stones had been attributed by eye. Its source is thought to be somewhere in north Pembrokeshire. In addition, one of Cunnington’s samples proved to be an example of Ixer and Bevins’s “Dacite Group D”, one of only two known instances of this rock type from the Stonehenge monument.

Mike Pitts, British Archaeology magazine February 2022

The microscope and slides will be displayed at the Museum later in the Spring.