British Archaeology -- corrupted by assumptions of significance

The big lump of foliated rhyolite exposed at Rhosyfelin during the archaeological dig.  If you are a geomorphologist, you see a jumble of rockfall debris beneath a fractured rockface which has been subjected to natural processes of breakdown over many millennia. If you are an imaginative or ambitious archaeologist, you might see a Neolithic quarry, with a large detached monolith intended for shipment to Stonehenge.

My last post, about the celebrated Sir Mortimer Wheeler and his rather dodgy "spectacular find" of a mass war grave associated with a climactic battle between the Romans and the local defenders of the homeland in AD 43, is a reminder of a simple rule.  The more celebrated and ambitious you are,  the more spectacular your finds have to be in order to reinforce your status, and the more likely your peers are to accept your claims without careful scrutiny.  And another rule:  the more celebrated you are, the more you become a media darling, and the more likely the press is to give maximum publicity to any old piece of nonsense you may care to dish out. University press offices know this, and I have complained many times on this blog about the role of press officers in promoting very dodgy research in purple prose and of pretending that every small increment in knowledge is a "major breakthrough" of earth-shattering proportions.    OK -- we know all about the financial and other pressures under which universities operate nowadays, but corrupt research should be exposed for what it is, not supported, and lies should never be repeated on the pretence that they are the truth.

The elegant and dashing Sir Mortimer earned a reputation for extra-marital affairs, and also for his meticulous recordings of digs and for his adoption of "scientific methods".  He promoted himself as a pioneering and modern "scientific archaeologist."  But many of his interpretations were heavily criticised on the grounds that they were "over-interpretations" in which he attached great significance to insignificant things, in pursuit of the spectacular narrative.   He seemed not to worry too much about that, since he saw himself as a great educator with a mission to inform -- and indeed entertain -- the general public.

Fast forward to today, and the recent digs involving Prof Mike Parker Pearson and his team of faithful retainers at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog and Waun Mawn.  Once again we have a charismatic and forceful individual in charge, with a propensity for making outrageous claims about the significance of his "discoveries" and for grabbing the headlines.   We all know the famous quote about Rhosyfelin being "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries"..........  Mike is more like Indiana Jones than Sir Mortimer Wheeler, but that's fine.   I'm not against researchers selling their ideas and their discoveries as enthusiastically as possible, and communicating with anybody who is prepared to listen.  We all do it...... but.....

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-artificial-significance-of.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-strange-methods-of-megalithic.html

I recall my old friend Prof Brian Roberts of Durham University telling me that he is very worried about the propensity, within archaeology, for "assumptive research", in which you presume to know what you are looking for and looking at, even before you start digging, and that all you have to do is describe what you uncover and assign all of the "discovered" features to the appropriate bits of your ruling hypothesis.  That is exactly what Parker Pearson and his team have done at the three sites mentioned above.  At Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog they chose to accept the "guidance" of Ixer and Bevins that they were looking at bluestone monolith quarries, and simply attributed everything convenient to the activities of Neolithic quarrymen. (It's always handy to be able to divert the blame for your cock-ups onto somebody else.)  At no stage do they seem to have considered the possibility that the features they were looking at were entirely natural; and at no stage did they seek to demonstrate, through control digs at other sites, that their so-called "quarries" were in any way exceptional and important. I have challenged them on this many times, but the points I am making have of course been completely ignored.  They are in too deep now to get out of the hole, and they simply keep on digging.......

When it comes to dating techniques such as pollen analysis and radiocarbon dating, we see a similar tendency to read "confirmation" into dates which clearly indicate a long history of occupation -- as at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  At Rhosyfelin the wide scatter of dates is best interpreted as evidence of discontinuous and repeated occupation of the site over millennia, by hunting and fishing parties and maybe by tribesmen looking for small sharp and disposable cutting tools.  At Carn Goedog there are dateable organic materials, but again the date range is so huge that nothing can realistically be cited as being supportive of a monolith quarrying enterprise at the site.  What the dates at Carn Goedog show is that the site has been intermittently used by travellers and hunting parties for millennia -- just like all the other tors of the Preseli uplands.

At Waun Mawn I expect the same thing to happen when the next paper from the MPP team is published.  Again, there are roots, bits of wood and charcoal, and other organic materials showing up on old land surfaces.  Some of them suggest wildfires and others suggest occupation -- but we know already from the abundant prehistoric remains on Waun Mawn that there was a lot of activity here in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.  But the archaeologists will find clusters of dates, by hook or by crook, and they will claim that the clusters are evidence of (a) the construction of a vast circle of monoliths, and (b) the removal of the bulk of the stones for transport to Stonehenge.  The narrative is, quite literally, set in stone, and is immovable.........

Thinking of digging, it's worth reminding ourselves that one of the characteristics of archaeological excavations is that the archaeologists who open them up are able to describe them as they wish, under conditions of some secrecy, and to then fill them up again, shutting them off from scrutiny by others.  That's a dangerous scenario -- and it places an even greater ethical burden on archaeologists than on geologists and geomorphologists (for example) whose exposures are on open display, available for others to scrutinise at their leisure.  My colleagues and I, in our geomorphology / Quaternary publications, have nowhere to hide;  if our publications are full of bullshit, that will soon be revealed when others turn up and examine the exposures that we have flagged up as being important as "type localities."

So -- corruption everywhere, at least in the small area which I know well.  It would not have been exposed had I not lived within a few miles of the excavation sites and had I not been familiar with all the features given "significance" by the diggers.   How widespread this corruption is, I cannot tell.  But from my conversations with other archaeologists, rather a lot of them have major concerns about the behaviour of certain very powerful members of the archaeology establishment.  Do they have the guts and the self-confidence to write and publish critiques on the lines of those published by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and me?  Thus far, they are all too timid -- or claim that they cannot comment on other people's work without themselves knowing the sites concerned.  Those of us who observe what is going on are not quite sure whether to laugh or cry.....