DOI: 10.17033/data.00000240
title: Petrography, geochemistry and mineralogy of the Stonehenge sarsens: Digital data collection

description: This dataset includes a suite of digital materials that, in combination, characterise the petrography, mineralogy and geochemistry of a sarsen upright (Stone 58) from the central trilithon horseshoe at Stonehenge. All digital materials are held by the Archaeology Data Service at https://doi.org/10.5284/1084808 (see link under Related Resources). The collection arises from work undertaken during the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust project “Geochemical fingerprinting the sarsen stones at Stonehenge” (Small Research Grant SG-170610), led by the University of Brighton. As part of the project, permission was granted by English Heritage to sample a section from one of three cores drilled through the full thickness of Stone 58 during conservation work in 1958. This core had been returned to the UK from Florida in 2018 by Mr Robert Phillips, an employee of Van Moppes (Diamond Tools) Ltd, Basingstoke, who had been at Stonehenge during the drilling work. Mr Phillips was granted permission by the Ministry of Works to retain the core on behalf of the company and was gifted it by Van Moppes on his retirement to the USA. This core – referred to as the Phillips’ Core – is now held in the English Heritage Collections Store at Temple Cloud (Bath, UK). The Phillips’ Core is 108cm long, has a 2.5cm diameter and is broken into six pieces ranging in length from 7 to 29cm. The digital materials within this collection result from the analysis of section 2-3 of the core, from 29 to 36cm along its length. Full details of sampling, analytical approaches and interpretation are provided in Nash et al. (2021), which can be accessed via the Related Resources.
description: The data collection comprises the following separate elements (full details of methods are given in Nash et al. (2021): 1. Computed tomography (CT) scan images of Section 2-3 of the Phillips’ Core (with accompanying .xml and .txt files) plus a movie file of the CT scan reconstruction; 2. Thin-section images covering the full area of Section 2-3 of the Phillips’ Core in plane-polarised and cross-polarised light; 3. Spreadsheets of geochemical data, including chemical analyses of (i) the full Phillips’ Core by portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (XRF), (ii) Section 2-3 of the core by high-resolution XRF-scanner, and (iii) powdered subsamples from Section 2-3 by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and ICP-atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES) with accompanying quality control data; 4. Selected micro-XRF elemental maps covering the full area of Section 2-3 of the Phillips’ Core; 5. Scanning electron microscope energy-dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS) images covering the majority of the area of Section 2-3 of the Phillips’ Core. 6. SEM back-scattered electron images covering the full area of Section 2-3 of the Phillips’ Core. Additional datasets are available in Nash et al. (2021). These include a sedimentary log of the full Phillips’ Core, plus SEM-cathodoluminescence, automated SEM-EDS (QEMSCAN) and whole-rock isotope analyses of sub-samples and thin-sections from Section 2-3 of the core.