Waun Mawn: the ruling hypothesis rules, OK?

I managed to take a look at MPP's 20-minute talk out "in the field" at Waun Mawn and issued by the NPA as part of their Archaeology Day promotion.  The NPA is trying to raise its profile through slick marketing, and it suits them to have a high-status hero (yet again!) to enthuse the masses with his particular brand of storytelling.  And obviously MPP is marketing himself and his ideas for reasons that are not too difficult to discern.  So this is not a scientific video but a marketing exercise -- and on that basis perhaps we should simply tolerate the fact that it consists of a string of assertions, assumptions and speculations and hardly any verifiable facts?

Well, yes and no.  It's not a scientific explanation aimed at a peer-group -- but it is such a complacent and biased version of reality that I'm amazed  that MPP had the brass to do it and I'm also amazed that the NPA is prepared to put up with it -- ignoring the fact that the cited evidence has never been examined by independent archaeologists and that the narrative in the video has never been tested through academic scrutiny either.  At every stage of the narrative inconvenient evidence is simply brushed aside as immaterial, the truth is twisted to fit the ruling hypothesis, and highly subjective interpretations of features on the ground are presented as established facts.  And as ever (this is getting boring) there is never any mention of the fact that aspects of the narrative (think quarries, overland routes, bluestone sources and Altar Stone provenance) are hotly disputed in the literature.  MPP seems to have a rather charming Trumpian view of science --"This is my truth, and if scientists disagree with me, tough luck, because they are wrong and I am right.  Other so-called experts should be ignored because they are probably charlatans...."

Let's just remind ourselves that there is NOTHING in the literature to back up what MPP is saying about Waun Mawn on this video.  The only two documents published by him and his colleagues are "field reports" from the 2017 and 2018 digging seasons, written in order to demonstrate to funding organizations that their grant aid has been well spent, and in order to elicit future funds for follow-up work.  Spectacular results and grandiose claims about the significance of findings are required in such situations, and the reports make no pretence of academic rigour.  Observations and interpretations are so scrambled that the texts and images are effectively useless for anybody seeking to understand what has gone on at Waun Mawn in the past.

That having been said, there is one brief study that does try to present evidence prior to discussing and interpreting it -- and that is my own "working paper" published on Researchgate, with a substantial input from a number of conversations with other observers:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345177590_Waun_Mawn_and_the_search_for_Proto-_Stonehenge

It's already had more than 200 reads, so somebody out there is taking it seriously, and I await disputatious feedback with relish!  It's interesting that many of the basic observations incorporated into my paper (relating to geology, landscape and other archaeological features) are completely ignored by MPP.

One interesting thing about this video is that MPP seems to make a virtue of being determined to confirm the ruling stone circle hypothesis come hell or high water -- and he seems inordinately proud of the fact that he came back to Waun Mawn and carried on looking for sockets even when the geophysics results provided no encouragement at all.  In fact his bloody-minded conviction and refusal to give up has now become a part of the narrative!  Heroic Indiana Pearson persists, against all the odds, and finally prevails!!  He seems blissfully unaware of the fact that when you are so determined to find something, you may well end up seeing what isn't there, and also manufacturing evidence to support your cause.........  Don't be surprised; they have done it before, at  both Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog..........

I could go through his talk sentence by sentence, pointing out his omissions, misunderstandings and misrepresentations, but I have done it all before, and there was essentially nothing new in the first part of the talk.  But there was some interesting material when it came to the radiocarbon and OSL dating commissioned by the research team.  

In brief, the radiocarbon dating (of around 40 samples?) proved to be very inconvenient, with most of the small carbonized wood samples proving to date from the Mesolithic.  Some of them were clearly found within the so-called "stone sockets" and had to be explained away as a consequence of downward particle movement assisted by earthworms.  Believe that if you will....... I think that on balance I prefer to think that the fragments were in their "right" positions on an undulating sediment surface, and that the claimed sockets are not sockets at all.  Let's wait and see the colour of the evidence.   Apparently only four of the dates are from the Neolithic, ranging from 3,600 - 3,000 BC.  That means all the others are from earlier or later settlement episodes.  That does nothing at all to enhance the theory that this is a significant Neolithic site.

The OSL dates were taken from the "sides of the sockets" -- what does that mean?  Were they taken from sediment fills, or not?  According to MPP,  five  sockets were dated to 3,800  BC - 3,200 BC -- ie 200 years before Stonehenge was built.  On this basis MPP argues that the Waun Mawn circle was erected before 3,200 BC, which would make it the third oldest circle in the UK.  But there appear to be other dates for "sediment fills" clustered around 2,000 BC --  and this leads him to conclude (goodness knows why) that the stones were taken away to Stonehenge around 3,000 BC -- very conveniently at just the right time to be used in the Aubrey Holes.  (As we may recall, MPP is convinced that the Aubrey Holes held bluestones before they were moved out and rearranged in something like their current settings......) 

Until we see the hard evidence of where these samples were taken from  and what the dating errors might be, it is difficult to know how to interpret the narrative being developed by MPP.  How many "inconvenient" dates are conveniently being ignored? Most of them, by the look of it.  And what are the ages of all the other monuments in this neighbourhood?  They are not even mentioned by MPP, let alone studied.  Control studies and control dates do not figure in the grand scheme of things as designed by this particular group of archaeologists.

In spite of the bravado of MPP on this video, and in his other talks around the country, it's clear that the archaeologists are far from convinced about their "giant stone circle" at Waun Mawn;  they only have four stones (of very different sizes) in the putative circle, and six stone "sockets" that may of course be entirely natural.  The idea that these six irregular hollows held monoliths that have been removed is speculation, pure and simple.   The evidence is as thin as it ever was.   So their revised position is that the stone circle was maybe started and never finished. But they still have to sustain the pretence that 80 bluestones were transported from West Wales to Stonehenge, and the latest evolution of the narrative is that there may be another dismantled stone circle somewhere in the vicinity, waiting to be found, and that some stones may also have been exported directly from Carn Goedog to Stonehenge without being used initially in a local stone setting.  Oh dear.  The narrative gets ever more convoluted..........

The most interesting thing about this video, and about MPP's take on local archaeology, is that it is actually all to do with Stonehenge, not North Pembrokeshire.  He and his colleagues are so obsessed with the "Stonehenge Neolithic mythos" that the significance of everything observed at Waun Mawn has to be measured in terms of its impact on Stonehenge.  This is exactly the sort of thing that Gordon Barclay and Kenny Brophy complained about in their recent article.  The obsession is distinctly unhealthy.....

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

So where are we now with the Waun Mawn situation?  As I said in my working paper on Researchgate, there might have been a small stone setting here in the Neolithic, and this might be quite early in British terms.  There might have been  a few more stones to start with, but the evidence on that is not convincing.  The setting, in terms of local Neolithic / Bronze Age archaeology, is interesting but not spectacular; stones were used singly or in groups, but there was no preferential use of spotted dolerite or foliated rhyolite, and no evidence that "quarried stone" was ever used.  Those who put up standing stones used whichever pillars or slabs just happened to be available in the vicinity.  And the Waun Mawn radiocarbon and OSL dates suggest that whatever was going on here was at about the same time as lots of other activity across the British Isles. The dating evidence from Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog tells us nothing about quarrying, and simply confirms that there were people living in the area in the Neolithic / Bronze Age transition period.  But we knew that already.   There is nothing whatsoever at Waun Mawn to link it with Stonehenge, and no amount of fantasising is going to alter that fact.