Quote from the 2018 Waun Mawn Report:
Ongoing plans
The Waun Mawn results are extremely encouraging, confirming the existence of a bluestone circle dismantled in prehistory, very likely to be one of the monuments from which Stonehenge was built. When the full analyses of scientific dating and geological analysis are completed, we plan an interim publication on these exciting results in the international journal Antiquity.
No further excavations are planned in 2019 but we hope to return for another season of excavation in 2020. In 2019 the project’s archaeo-astronomer, Prof. Clive Ruggles will analyse the stone circle’s astronomical attributes to establish whether it was oriented towards midsummer solstice sunrise or northern major moonrise.
Acknowledgements
We thank the Gerda Henkel Stiftung and the Rust Family Foundation for their financial support as well as UCL and the University of Southampton for their fieldwork contributions. Raw-Cut TV have also supported the project in recent years. The NERC Radiocarbon Panel awarded a grant for dating of 39 radiocarbon samples from Waun Mawn. Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer and Nick Pearce provided geological identifications.
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This, of course, is nonsense: "......confirming the existence of a bluestone circle dismantled in prehistory, very likely to be one of the monuments from which Stonehenge was built." But we'll move swiftly on.
I'm intrigued by the sponsorship by Raw Cut TV -- so there is, as we thought, a documentary in the making. The company says this about itself: "we are the industry leader in crime documentary ‘blue light’ programmes." Wow -- is Waun Mawn now confirmed as a crime site? The biggest archaeological hoax of all time? Remember, folks, you heard it from me first......
The only thing that might have happened this year? Maybe Clive Ruggles checking on the archaeo-astronomy of the supposed standing stone circle? Apparently he was planning to check whether the circle was oriented towards midsummer solstice or northern major moonrise -- I am greatly intrigued by the concept that a circle can be oriented towards anything at all, but there you go....... but if you try hard enough, I suppose you can always find a stone or a slight depression that you might wish to call a stone socket aligned with something or other. The search for significance is a wonderful thing, and can become an obsession.
I'm reminded of all the lovely people who take pictures of the setting or rising sun shining brightly beneath the capstone of Pentre Ifan (or some other cromlech) and between the supporting pillars, and then saying "Ah yes -- this was clearly the intention of the builders, and explains why the cromlech was built just here." They never do get round to explaining what is significant about 8.39 pm on August 13th -- or whatever -- which was the time at which the "perfect" photo was obtained. There's nowt so queer as folk.
It reminds me too of the Robin Heath school of number-crunching, circles, lines and triangles, in which he seems to suggest that all archaeological monuments (or rather, the ones he chooses to select) were built at precise points according to strict geometrical patterns -- although the "points" were hundreds of miles apart and although the Neolithic builders were not in possession of GPS positioning devices. His suggestion seems to be that our Neolithic ancestors were such brilliant readers of the stars that they were able to precisely position their "meaningful megalithic structures" to within a few metres, and that the inhabitants of communities widely separated across these islands were all somehow tuned in to the same cunning plan devised by the God of Mathematics or some such deity. Wonderful stuff. "Sacred geometry" is the term Robin uses, claiming some sort of ancestry involving Prof Fred Hoyle. But it doesn't do anybody any harm, and I suppose it keeps people out of mischief......
Robin recently ran a two-day course in North Pembs (£315 pp) on "sacred geometry" and his particular version of "proto-Stonehenge" -- I hope those attending got their money's worth!
A favourite post of mine relates to the position of Woolworths Stores, as mapped by Matt Parker.
Quote: ".........in any sufficiently large set of random data it is possible to find meaningless patterns of any required accuracy.”
In any set of points plotted on a map (such as a map of Neolithic or megalithic sites in the UK) you can simply skip over the vast majority of the sites that happen to be inconvenient, and home in on the few that happen to coincide with the lines or corners of whatever triangle or other shape that you choose to demonstrate as "meaningful." The more data or plotted points you have, the greater is your ability to pull meaningless patterns from them.
Matt Parker had the locations of 800 Woolworth stores to work with. He was still able to find close "fits" with his chosen lines, distances, and geometric shapes, just as Robin Heath and others have done with their maps. The more random or precisely positioned points you have on the map, the greater the chance of finding "meaningful" patterns. If you just plot standing stones, or Neolithic henges, on a map, some geometric patterns will be found; but if you then add long barrows, round barrows, causeways, etc, your data set is greatly enlarged, and more and more "patterns" can be "discovered." If you want to increase your prospects of finding patterns even further, you can add in ALL prehistoric features, or "meaningful points in the landscape", such as Carn Meini, Glastonbury Tor, Lundy Island, Bardsey island, Caldey Island, or the tips of peninsulas or river mouths. You end up with hundreds if not thousands of points in the landscape, enabling you to find patterns everywhere, with close matches for triangles of various shapes and sizes, circles, straight lines, and curves.
You can play little games, just as they do in Playgroups and primary schools with very small children, by creating predetermined shapes (such as triangles of circles) and moving them around on your map with thousands of random points in it, and finding "fits." If the points of your triangle do not EXACTLY coincide with the "meaningful places" on your map, you can explain this away by using some pseudo-scientific phrase relating to degrees of confidence, or by saying "the fit is accurate to within 0.5%" or "the fit is almost perfect" -- or even by saying that the map itself is inaccurate, or that coastal erosion since the Neolithic has moved your crucial point from A to B. This is quite wonderful! You can do almost anything, and find "meaning" and "ancient wisdom" or "sacred geometry" in almost anything, as Matt Parker has pointed out.
This is not science. It is pseudo-science, pure and simple. Put another way, it is a little game that one might play with one's grandchildren. What is amazing is that some people actually write books about this sort of stuff, and that people buy them and read them, and are apparently swept away into a state of wonderment. What does it tell us about the human condition? Well, it tells us, I suppose, that the yearning for a rediscovery of "ancient wisdom" is still as strong as ever, that people have a strong sense of spatial awareness, and want to find patterns or "sacred geometry" in landscapes, or order where there is chaos. It also tells us that people are remarkably poorly educated and that they are just as gullible as our ancestors were in the Middle Ages.
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This is all part of a continuum -- and, I suppose, part of the human condition. When faced with features in the landscape some people will always look for significance, and go to enormous lengths to find it, assuming that there was, long ago, an ancient wisdom that we must try to identify or unravel. I suspect that in reality many of the monuments that we like to call "sacred" were actually rather utilitarian, built not out of reverence for the heavens and the starry alignments but just because that was where Grandfather Dafydd lived, or liked to sit in the sun, or where some large stones happened to be lying around.
2 comments:
The bloke who ran the plan and map print room in the basement of Wiltshire County Hall used to fill his occasional slack periods of work by getting out large scale O.S sheets and conjuring up what he hoped were significant lines between ancient monuments sitting amongst the plains and hills of our County.
I understand he tried to convert the Wiltshire County Archaeologist to his way of thinking, but without any success.
I wonder who Gerda Henkel Stiftung is? What nationality? Does she live under a cromlech somewhere, or beneath a bunker?? Is she a distinguished Scandinavian archaeologist? She has provided financial support, it says in the Acknowledgements. Any ideas or knowledge welcomed.
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