Mike Pitts on stone socket dimensions

Breaking news..........

THE WAUN MAWN FANTASY


In an unexpected intervention, Mike Pitts, one of the most influential persons in British archaeology, has drawn attention to the fact that the Waun Mawn "stone sockets" are completely unsuitable in their dimensions ever to have held large standing stones. He has compared them with the dimensions of known stone holes at Stonehenge -- and with postholes at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge -- and has found that they occupy a quite different place on the graph when plotted as depth x width. I never expected to be "on the same side" as Mike Pitts on anything, but there you go........

The graph reproduced above was issued a short while ago on Mike's Twitter feed, and I suppose it will also appear shortly on his "Digging Deeper" blog. He beat me to it! This was something I was planning to do, but it had not yet reached the top of my "to do" list...........

Mike does the MPP team the honour of accepting that the things they have looked at are genuine stone sockets from which stones have been removed -- but I disagree with that, and remain unconvinced that ANY of the half dozen or so hollows or undulations in the ground at Waun Mawn actually held standing stones.

MPP and Alice will not be amused.......

Aubrey Hole 7 at Stonehenge. Most of them are about 1m deep and are up to 1.5m across

One of the "multiple large stone holes" at Waun Mawn. From the sublime to the ridiculous........

Strangely, the original graph of Aubrey Hole dimensions was published by Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues in 2009, in the "Antiquity" article entitled "Who was buried at Stonehenge". It was a long tome ago -- he has probably forgotten about it long since........

Another of Mike's photos from Stonehenge, showing the scale very well indeed:

PS.         Here is another version of the Waun Mawn story, in MPP's own words. Same old stuff, presented rather briefly, with the same outrageous speculations dressed up as facts.

https://theconversation.com/stonehenge-first-stood-in-wales-how-archaeologists-proved-parts-of-the-5-000-year-old-stone-circle-were-imported-155315?

He says, towards the end, that the evidence for a link between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge is strong. No it isn't -- it is non-existent.  by the look of it, Mike Pitts seems to agree with me on that.