I have been looking again at Mike Parker Pearson's big article called "Science and Stonehenge", published by the Netherlands Museum for Anthropology and Prehistory, in March 2018 (61 pp).
I commented earlier on the apparently radical idea that recent Stonehenge researches (presumably by MPP himself) were based upon the "application of a hypothesis-testing approach." Strange that anybody should think that to be novel or radical, or representring some sort of great scientific advance -- but maybe it was, and is, for archaeologists........
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/05/ruling-hypotheses-and-invented-evidence.html
Anyway, here I want to concentrate on the last few pages of the study, headed "Explaining Stonehenge." (pp 44-49)
Mike starts off by asking three questions:
1. Why was Stonehenge built?
2. What was the social, economic and environmental context?
3. Why is is such a "singular monument" uniquely utilising stones that were "brought unparalleled distances, dressed and raised as lintels on top of uprights"?
Bias from the outset. We would agree that it is indeed a "singular monument" -- with some stones dressed and other stones raised and used as lintels resting on uprights. But we will ignore the bit about stones being "brought unparalleled distances" as unsupported speculation, even though MPP might think he has proved the point in the earlier part of the paper. (His section on Stage 1 of the stone monument - c 5000 BP -- is as replete as ever with wishful thinking and selective citations.)
Let's think about context. MPP admits that archaeologists and historians have traditionally accepted that the best circumstances for prehistoric monument building involve surplus production; a large population "freed up" from subsistence activities like hunting and gathering, farming and fishing; centralised structures of authority; long-distance exchange networks; and hospitable environmental conditions. In his 2012 book MPP was fully signed up to this "traditionalist" style of thinking, following Gordon Childe and many others. This is one report from 2012:
Stonehenge Built as Symbol of Unity
Analysis by Rossella Lorenzi
Fri Jun 22, 2012
Stonehenge was built as a monument to unify the peoples of Britain, researchers have concluded after 10 years of archaeological investigations.
Dismissing all previous theories, scientists working on the Stonehenge Riverside Project (SRP) believe the enigmatic stone circle was built as a grand act of union after a long period of conflict between east and west Britain.
Coming from southern England and from west Wales, the stones may have been used to represent the ancestors of some of Britain's earliest farming communities.
According study leader Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, Britain's Neolithic people became increasingly unified during the monument's main construction around 3000 B.C. to 2500 B.C.
"There was a growing island-wide culture -- the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast," Parker Pearson said.
"Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification," Parker Pearson said.
According to the researcher, who has detailed the new theory in the book Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery, the place in the county of Wiltshire where the iconic stones were erected was not chosen by chance.
On the contrary, it already had special significance for prehistoric Britons.
http://news.discovery.com/history/stonehenge-unify-britain-120622.htmlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-18550513
So the bluestones, embodying the spirits of the ancestors, were carried all the way from West Wales to the chalklands of Salisbury Plain, as a great act of political unification and solidarity in a peaceful episode following a period of east-west conflict?
That all sounds wonderful, until you start to look at the context in a bit more detail. MPP says "Yet there are indications that Stonehenge was constructed in times of economic crisis, social disaggregation and population decline. He reckons that there was a population decline going on after the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, after 5500 BP -- at exactly the time that the bluestones were, according to his hypothesis, being carried from Preseli to Stonehenge. In the next paragraph he contradicts himself, arguing that the population was steady at this time, and was followed after 4,400 BP with the beginning of the Beaker period. Then he hops back to population decline again, linking it to climatic deterioration, declining soil fertility or the arrival of the plague.
Nonetheless, he speculates that there may well have been great regional variations in this dismal overall scenario, with places like Salisbury Plain still thriving, with population growth, large-scale tree clearance and -- by implication, growing economic power and cultural influence. By contrast, west Wales is portrayed as a cultural backwater -- and MPP throws out the idea that there was a "real absence of people, caused by emigration." Presumably MPP thinks that there was a real folk migration, with the local West Walians heading off the Stonehenge, carrying the spirits of their ancestors with them in the form of bluestone monolith offerings. In support of this, he cites the extremely dodgy work on strontium isotope ratios, which does not withstand any scrutiny.
MPP cites the new work on the cultural implications of the waves of immigrants who came in from the continent during the Neolithic, but argues that "regional tomb styles" gave way to "less regionally confined monument types such as cursuses and henges. (Did they? In Wales? Not as far as I am aware.....) He says: "The social context in which Stonehenge's first two stages were built was one of increasing island-wide commonality in terms of shared cultural practices." He then returns the the theme of the unification of the ancestors, referring again to the long-distance transport of large monoliths as "a defining cultural feature." Then: "In the case of the bluestones, some or even all of them may have been brought from a stone circle in Preseli, a stone circle that could have been one of the two largest in Britain. Thus Stonehenge may well be a second-hand monument, incorporating aspects of symbolism relating to one or more earlier stone circles."
So it goes on in inimitable MPP style, with another suggestion that the bluestones represent the ancestry of Neolithic groups who arrived in the far west and that Stage 2 at Stonehenge was an attempt to "reassert unity" in the face of threatening forces coming in from the continent -- in the form of the tribes from the steppes and the carriers of the bell beaker culture.
The new work, involving scientists from other disciplines, paints a very different picture of a Neolithic community that was vulnerable, divided, and economically and culturally rather variable. There does not appear to be any "cultural window of opportunity" for the mass emigration of people from west Wales towards Salisbury Plain, or for the "political unification" episode on which MPP is so keen.
It's all as fanciful as ever, and MPP is no closer, at the end of this article to explaining why Stonehenge was built where it is. His work is based entirely on circular reasoning. The bluestones were carried by Neolithic tribesmen. That assumption is never questioned. Therefore they were technically accomplished, motivated and well organized. They must have had a "settled" episode during which the stones could be carried. There must have been a sort of political unification going on. And how might that have expressed itself? Ah yes, by the transport of the spirits of the ancestors from location A to location B. And so it goes on, ever more fantastical and ever more absurd.
As we all know, there is no evidence for any of the narrative -- and that is why the "quarry hunters" now appear to have given up on their search for more quarries and for "proto-Stonehenge" . It seems to me that MPP is in a frightful tangle, as a new picture of a chaotic and fractured British Neolithic world emerges from the work of others.
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