Prostrate at the shrine of the Stonehenge Neolithic Mythos

                                      

This latest book is part of a series arising from conferences held in Portugal -- the earler one was in 2015 and the latest one was held in 2019.

Here we go again. It gets positively bizarre and even unhealthy. Same old gang, same old obsession. Another paper from the MPP team that says nothing new, but which repeats the same old stuff in a slightly different format. Same old principle: if you repeat nonsense often enough and with sufficient bravado, people will be badgered into thinking that it is true.


Duty compels me to mention it, I suppose -- so here are the details:

Mike Parker Pearson, Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer, Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham. 2019. Long-distance landscapes: from quarries to monument at Stonehenge. MEGALITHS AND GEOLOGY, Boaventura, Mataloto & Pereira,
eds. (2019). pp. 183-200

https://www.academia.edu/44065619/Long_distance_landscapes_from_quarries_to_monument_at_Stonehenge?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

Abstract

Stonehenge is famous for the distances moved by its stones, both sarsens and bluestones. In particular, the bluestones have their geological origins in West Wales, 225km away. Recent excavations at two of these bluestone sources — one for rhyolite and one for spotted dolerite — have identified evidence of megalith quarrying around 3000 BC, when Stonehenge' s first stage was constructed. This remarkable movement of bluestones from Wales coincided with a decline in regional cultural distinctions between west and east, suggesting that building Stonehenge may have served to unify the Neolithic populations of Britain.

I'm not going to scrutinize or analyse the paper (or book chapter), because it says nothing that is new, but it is interesting in that it does everything that Gordon Barclay and Kenny Brophy complained about in their recent paper:

Gordon J. Barclay & Kenneth Brophy (2020): ‘A veritable chauvinism of prehistory’: nationalist prehistories and the ‘British’ late Neolithic mythos, Archaeological Journal,
DOI: 10.1080/00665983.2020.1769399

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2020/07/bluestones-and-interpretative-inflation.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-origins-of-british-neolithic-mythos.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-politicisation-of-neolithic.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-stonehenge-myth-machine-high-time.html

A definition of the Stonehenge Neolithic "Mythos":  

Monuments in the Stonehenge area had a ‘national’, ‘unifying’ role for ‘Britain’ at a time when ‘Britain’ had a ‘unified culture’, and as part of this process of unification, bluestone monoliths deemed to be “significant” were transported from “Wales" and animals to be consumed in feasting were driven from as far away as "Scotland".

Everything in this new paper by Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues smacks of worship at the mythos shrine -- Stonehenge is at the centre of things, and homage to the centre comes from the peripheries.  As Barclay and Brophy point out, this is a weird (and disrespectful) way of looking at things, since it ignores powerful evidence of cultural centres all over the British Isles which had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge and which in some ways were more impressive. Everything in this paper is expressed with certainty -- as ever, there is no acceptance of any disputes, be it in the field of so-called monolith quarrying at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog, or in the field of the so-called "mega-circle" at Waun Mawn, or in the field of strontium isotope studies. 

It is suggested in the paper that this is Stonehenge's single most important defining characteristic.  Quote:  "In contrast to many other megalithic monuments, the purpose of Stonehenge was not to erect a monument from the nearest available materials, but to bring specific stones across varying distances to a location which appears not to have been particularly favoured in terms of locally available stone resources."  That of course is not a statement of fact but a typically irresponsible piece of fantasising.   We don't even know that the Stonehenge stone setting was ever finished, and it has never been shown that the stones were not all collected up within the immediate neighbourhood.   But it's par for the course -- MPP and his team have been developing for years the narrative that the "bringing" of the stones was the important thing, as an act of ancestor worship or reverence.........

Gordon Childe is treated as some sort of prophet -- having written about "a degree of political unification or a sacred peace" centred on Stonehenge.  The authors here say: "We can elaborate on Childe’s hypothesis to suggest that the bluestones (and very possibly the cremated remains of some of the people buried with them at Stonehenge) were symbols of the ancestral origins of Neolithic groups in west Wales, combining their stones with the sarsens of southern and southeast England." And then: "There is growing evidence that Stonehenge may have been an axis mundi, a centre of origin for the people of southern Britain."   And then: "Bringing ancestral bluestones to this axis mundi from the far west could thus have served to unite the people of west and east in southern Britain around 2900 BC, after a thousand years of difference and even dispute between the two regions."

This is precisely the sort of quasi-political, quasi-sociological, quasi-religious claptrap that Barclay and Brophy are so concerned about, and I suggest that in future they might be a bit more direct in naming those who are leading a new generation of archaeologists (and the general public) up a very dangerous and very unscientific blind alley.