Waun Mawn -- what we know

One of the quarries near the hilltop

Question about Waun Mawn: Is there a Stonehenge connection?

First, the geological background

1.  There are 43 known bluestone monoliths or orthostats at Stonehenge, and maybe there were a few more which have been broken up and which have contributed to the assortment of packing stones, hammer stones, cobbles and debitage.  There must have been around 30 different provenances, although most of the bluestones can be classified within a number of broader rock types, including spotted dolerites, unspotted dolerites, rhyolites, ashes and sandstones.

2.  Most of the known bluestones have come from Mynydd Preseli in Pembrokeshire, although not one of the stones has been provenanced to a precise location which can be given a full grid reference. Two papers claim to have identified the rocky crags of Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog as the places from which some foliated rhyolites and spotted dolerites have come:

"CRAIG RHOS-Y-FELIN, PONT SAESON IS THE DOMINANT SOURCE OF THE STONEHENGE RHYOLITIC ‘DEBITAGE’
Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins, Archaeology in Wales 50, 2011, pp 21-31
http://www.academia.edu/3990426/Craig_Rhos-y-felin_is_the_dominant_source_of_the

"Carn Goedog is the likely major source of Stonehenge doleritic bluestones: evidence based on compatible element geochemistry and Principal Component Analysis"
Journal of Archaeological Science
Richard E. Bevins, Rob A. Ixer, Nick J.G. Pearce
Journal of Archaeological Science, 19 November 2013
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313003956#FCANote

It is significant that these two papers, dealing with quite sophisticated geological analyses, were published in archaeological journals -- so it is probable that they were peer reviewed by archaeologists, and not by geologists.  All other papers claiming accurate provenancing of the spotted dolerite and foliated rhyolite bluestones, including those in glossy popular archaeology magazines, can be ignored because they are derivative and are not peer-reviewed.  They are full of speculations and assumptions unsupported by the evidence.

3.  It should be noted that there are no known bluestone orthostats at Stonehenge that are made of foliated rhyolite.  Foliated rhyolite debitage may or may not have come from a destroyed orthostat, or several.  Not one of the spotted dolerite orthostats at Stonehenge has been provenanced accurately to the crag at Carn Goedog.  In fairness to Bevins, Ixer and Pearce, all they claim in their important paper is that Carn Goedog is the "likely" source of some Stonehenge dolerite bluestones; and they were not able to demonstrate that any bluestones came from the crag rather than from other locations on the dolerite sill that stretches towards Carn Alw.  From the evidence presented, it can be argued that the 22 Stonehenge samples analysed had all come from different locations.

4.  I have spoken to many geologists who have examined the papers and have looked at the key locations; not one of them accepts that "spot provenencing" to "within a few square metres" is possible, at either location.  The sampling density is simply not tight enough.  I have analysed the data on many occasions on this blog, and in two peer-reviewed articles Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd,  John Downes and I have argued that NONE of the fragments at Stonehenge has been accurately provenanced to the crag at Rhosyfelin:

Brian John, Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes. 2015. OBSERVATIONS ON THE SUPPOSED “NEOLITHIC BLUESTONE QUARRY” AT CRAIG RHOSYFELIN, PEMBROKESHIRE". Archaeology in Wales 54, pp 139-148. (Publication 14th December 2015)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286775899_

Brian John, Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and John Downes (2015a). "Quaternary Events at Craig Rhosyfelin, Pembrokeshire." Quaternary Newsletter, October 2015 (No 137), pp 16-32.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283643851_QUATERNARY_EVENTS_AT_CRAIG_RHOSYFELIN_PEMBROKESHIRE

5.  Significantly, in the three years that have passed since the publication of these two papers, they have not been cited once by Parker Pearson, Ixer and Bevins in their publications dealing with Stonehenge and the bluestones.  The strategy is clearly that everything inconvenient should simply be ignored.  This is not how you are supposed to do science.

Second, the so-called "quarries"

The evidence for Neolithic quarrying is even more flimsy. Again, most of the articles referring to the "bluestone quarries" can be ignored, because they are in popular glossy magazines published without peer review. The two peer-reviewed articles are these:

Parker Pearson M, et al. Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity. 2015;89(348):1331–1352. 

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/121403/1/121403.pdf

"Megalith quarries for Stonehenge’s bluestones", by Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham, Chris Casswell, Duncan Schlee, Dave Shaw, Ellen Simmons, Adam Stanford, Richard Bevins & Rob Ixer.

Antiquity, June 2018 (preprint).

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/421631/1/Megalith_quarries_Antiquity_REVISED.pdf

1.  The first of these papers is described by Prof Danny McCarroll as "one of the worst papers I have ever read".  The second one is described by me  through the use of exactly the same words.  Both papers are published in a journal which originates in Cambridge University, supposedly one of the great bastions of learning and academic rigour.  But somehow these papers have been peer-reviwed and then scrutinized by an editor prior to acceptance and publication, in spite of the fact that both of them abandon academic tradition completely.  Both papers ignore the need for evidence presentation, interpretation and discussion and opt instead for the "marketing" approach.  Both papers are simply used as vehicles for the promotion of the quarrying hypothesis, presumably on the cheerful assumption that everybody reading the articles is perfectly happy to accept everything which the authors choose to say.

One cannot understand why the 12 authors involved (including geologists Bevins and Ixer) have allowed their names to be attached to these papers, and one can only be saddened by the decline in the standards of academic publishing which has allowed these papers to slip through the net.

2.  In neither of the papers is there any acknowledgement of the fact that there is a major dispute going on over the designation of Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog as "quarrying sites."  The authors of the 2015 could and should have cited my 2008 book, but chose instead to ignore it.  The same authors, in the second paper (published 2018) could and should have cited the two peer-reviesed papers written by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and me, but chose to ignore them -- maintaining the absurd pretence that there is a "scientific consensus" that the quarrying hypothesis is correct and true.  That is both discourteous and deliberately misleading -- and it is tantamount to scientific misconduct.

3.  As my colleagues and I have shown in print, and as I have demonstrated on this blog, the so-called "evidence" of quarrying at both sites does not withstand scrutiny.  All of the "evidence" of engineering features can be more simply interpreted as evidence of natural processes at work -- including periglacial, glacial and glaciofluvial processes during the Devensian glacial episode.  We have already stated that some of the cited "evidence" has been deliberately or inadvertently "manufactured" as a result of selective sediment removal and as a result of the determination of the excavation team to demonstrate the correctness of their cause, come hell or high water.

4.  In relation to the organic remains and radiocarbon samples taken from the two sites, stretching from the Mesolithic through to historic times, it is apparent that (while charcoal in a sediment does not necessarily imply human occupation) the sites have been used intermittently by hunting and gathering parties for many thousands of years -- as one would expect.  There are no clearly defined quarrying layers at either Carn Goedog or Rhosyfelin associated with appropriate traces of human occupation or stone-working activity. 

5.  The radiocarbon dated obtained from the two sites, and now all published, show such a wide scatter and such a lack of clustering at the presumed time of quarrying (around 5,000 years ago) that they have to be interpreted as falsifying the quarrying hypothesis.  Prof Danny McCarroll noticed this in the case of the Rhosyfelin paper, and the same is true of the recent paper about Carn Goedog. 

The case for the Neolithic quarrying of bluestone monoliths at these two sites has  simply not been made.  In any case, with as many as 30 rock types from different locations represented at Stonehenge,  there cannot possibly have been that many quarries.  And finally, as I have pointed out many times on this blog, why would Neolithic tribesmen have bothered to try and extract monoliths from remote and difficult sites like Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin when the whole landscape was littered with suitable boulders, pillars and slabs following the Devensian glacial episode?

Third, the features at Waun Mawn

There is no doubt that the prehistoric and medieval landscape around Waun Mawn and Tafarn y Bwlch is a fascinating one.  There are standing stones, some of which might be on the periphery of an old stone circle, long embankments and ditches, stone extraction pits, apparent hut circles and at least one ring cairn, and traces of quarrying on the flanks and summit of the hill which leave those of us who have looked at them scratching our heads.  There are all the signs of a long history of settlement.  Are the features utilitarian or domestic, or should they be deemed to be "ritual"?  Maybe a mixture of both. 

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/05/waun-mawn-other-stone-settings.html 

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/tafarn-y-bwlch-stone-complex-waun-mawn.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/04/waun-mawn-and-cnwc-yr-hydd-mystery.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/gernos-fach-ring-cairn.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/breaking-news-researchers-stumble.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/05/hut-circle-on-waun-mawn.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/05/waun-mawn-destroyed-ring-cairns.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-waun-mawn-quarrying-complex.html

I cannot for the life of me see why any of this has anything at all to do with Stonehenge.  There are dolerite standing stones here, and there might be some pits, and some "missing" stones, but that is not much of a link.......

No, the reason for the "significance" now being attached to this site is that the radiocarbon dates for the presumed removal of monoliths from Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin do not match the expectations of the archaeologists.  So, they say, the stones must have been quarried earlier than expected, and then simply parked somewhere pending removal a few centuries later to Stonehenge.  That is really a rather weird deductive process -- since most people would simply have shrugged their shoulders by now and said "OK -- we got it wrong....."  But no, MPP and his jolly comrades are in too deep, and there are too many reputations on the line.  So backing off is not an option, and since so many assumptions and speculations have been piled one on top of another already, why not add an even more spectacular one -- PROTO-STONEHENGE!  So confident are they of fooling a gullible public yet again that the results of the 2018 research have already been announced, as we have seen.

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So, to summarise.  What we know is that the geological provenancing of Stonehenge bluestones to Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog is uncertain and probably unsafe; that the quarrying claims for Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog are undermined by the lack of convincing quarrying traces and by the disastrously inconvenient radiocarbon dates obtained by the researchers; and that there is no reason whatsoever to link Waun Mawn either with bluestone monolith quarries or with Stonehenge.

Dare we hope that before too long the MPP research team will have the good grace to admit all of that?