Proto-Stonehenge, Waun Mawn and the burden of proof

Further to my previous post, rumour has it that the dig is now complete, and that the diggers will be filling in, tidying up, and moving on within the next couple of days. The Pembrokeshire Historical Society members visited the site of Sunday for a guided tour;  maybe other groups have also visited.  This week MPP will be giving his latest talk three times in the local area.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/09/waun-mawn-unfinished-business.html 

Since it was announced even before the 2018 dig commenced, and since Waun Mawn has been widely flagged up as Proto-Stonehenge on the basis of no evidence and much speculation, it's worth reminding ourselves what a task MPP and his team have on their hands.   We are not just dealing with Occam's Razor here, but with Hitchens's Razor too.

Wikipedia:
"Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor asserting that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, the claim is unfounded and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. It is named, echoing Occam's razor, for the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who, in a 2003 Slate article, formulated it thus: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

And as Carl Sagan said: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence":

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_extraordinary_evidence

See these posts:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/05/hitchenss-razor-and-century-of.html  
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/08/bluestone-transport-how-archaeologists.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-artificial-significance-of-waun-mawn.html

I don't want to go over all that again, but let's remind ourselves of a quite extraordinary claim: namely that the stones used in the  bluestone settings at Stonehenge were brought, lock, stock and barrel, from an older (Neolithic) stone setting at Waun Mawn, in the form of a giant venerated stone circle which used stones quarried from Rhosyfelin (foliated rhyolite), Carn Goedog (spotted dolerite), Cerrigmarchogion (dolerite) and Pontyglasier (Palaeozoic sandstone).  In the light of what has already been claimed in print by MPP and his team, the burden of proof rests squarely on their shoulders, and they will look extremely foolish if this all proves to have been a classic wild goose chase.

This is what they now have to do:

1.  Prove that around 80 bluestone monoliths were arranged in a giant circle here, and that they were later taken away in a concerted fashion over a short period of time.

2. Prove that the putative stone circle was Neolithic, not Bronze age.

3.  Prove that the stones were all placed here around 5,600 yrs BP and all taken away around 5,000 yrs BP.

4.  Prove that the stone circle was not made of dolerite and meta-mudstone monoliths picked up in the neighbourhood, but of spotted dolerite monoliths from Carn Goedog, foliated rhyolite from Rhosyfelin, sandstones from the Afon Nyfer headwaters near Pontglasier, and unspotted dolerite from Cerrigmarchogion.

5.  Prove that any "sockets" discovered really did hold monoliths, and that they are not simply extraction pits marking places from which stones have been collected for use elsewhere on Waun Mawn.  They must also prove that they are not simply natural hollows in the surface of the broken bedrock / till layer that lies beneath the thin surface peat and soil layer.

6.  Prove that any so-called traces of human activity on this site really do relate to settlement and "engineering work" and are not simply natural phenomena related to glacial and periglacial processes.

7.  Prove via control digs that any features exposed during this dig really are exceptional and significant, and that they are not just typical of what occurs beneath the peat across a wide swathe of countryside.

That is a pretty onerous set of requirements, but you make your bed, and you lie in it.  We can be quite sure that there will be meticulous surveying and recording of data, enthusiastic collection of organic materials for C14 dating and species identifications, collection of rock samples for the "pet rock boys" to look at, and much overflying and photography from Adam Stanford's drone.  The word is that the dig has been huge, spreading across more than a thousand square metres of moorland.

As Hitchens reminds us, there is no obligation on any of us to believe a single word that these diggers utter in support of their extravagant hypothesis, and certainly no obligation for us to believe what people say simply because they are "experts" or senior academics.

So we await their evidence, with interest.........