The "Lost Circle" fiasco -- underpinned by dodgy geology

The geology of the Waun Mawn area, from the Geology of Britain viewer. Note that 

there are strips of unspotted dolerite within 400m of the Waun Mawn dig site. 

The closest outcrop is around 200m away.  This map does not appear to have been looked 

at by the geologists.  And could it be that they just never got round to doing any fieldwork in the area prior to the writing of the "Antiquity" article?

Careless geology?  We could be a lot tougher than that, and call it incompetent, or fraudulent, but let's just go with the cockup theory instead of the conspiracy theory, because we are in a good mood today.  And as Sue Greaney says, we don't want to offend anybody, do we?

So what am I on about? Well, it is clear that the whole Waun Mawn project -- the search for the giant stone circle, or Proto-Stonehenge,  or the Holy Grail, or whatever you want to call it, is based upon the idea that monoliths were quarried or extracted from at least two locations (Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog) and were "parked up" somewhere before being shipped off to Stonehenge.  The idea that stones were carried a long way seems to be essential. The quarrying / stone haulage theory is based upon the fact that the radiocarbon dates from the various digs are completely confusing, suggesting that people were pottering about in this landscape much earlier than they should have been.  Very inconsiderate of them,  Don't ask me to explain what the convoluted logic behind that may be, but there you go.....

The geologists in the MPP team, Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer, have played a pivotal role in developing the quarrying hypothesis -- and they still promote it, quite gratuitously, in papers that have nothing to do with quarrying or quarries at all.  That's a pity, because it devalues what might otherwise be useful academic geology contributions to our knowledge of the Preseli region.  So they have fed the idea that monoliths of spotted dolerite from Carn Goedog and monoliths of foliated rhyolite from Rhosyfelin were "desirable" or valuable to Neolithic man -- and so special that they would be moved about over considerable distances, ending up at Stonehenge.  I have always disputed that idea, not just because there is no sound evidence of quarrying activity at either site, but because the geologists have never demonstrated satisfactorily that the fragments of rock that they have examined could not have come from anywhere else.  In the provenancing work, there has been a lot of over-egging of the pudding, if you will excuse the expression. And I'm not the only one saying that -- many senior earth scientists who have looked at the sites have said the same thing.

So Ixer and Bevins are in there, embedded in the team, and sharing responsibility for everything that MPP says on the record, in print.  And they have actively contributed to the development of the myth, in print, in their own specialised papers.

So to Waun Mawn.  And this is where it gets even more serious. As soon as MPP and his diggers started to look at Waun Mawn in 2017, I warned the geologists that they were ignoring the local geology and geomorphology at their peril.  I told them, on this blog and in correspondence, that they needed to front up and explain that there are unspotted dolerite dykes very close to the site of the putative "giant stone circle" and that there are so many dolerite erratics lying around on Waun Mawn that if the megalith builders had wanted stones for their projects, they were all there, on the front doorstep.  I pointed this out in my critiques of the "interim field reports" relating to the 2017 and 2018 digs, and I hoped that my comments might have borne fruit in the eagerly-awaited "Antiquity" paper, when it came.

Hillside near Tafarn y Bwlch.  A landscape of stones.  Nearly all unspotted dolerite. 

No quarrying necessary.

So now we have the paper, in print and all over the media. And what does it say about the local geology? Nothing at all, although there is a heading that says "The geology of the Waun Mawn stones." But it's worse than that, because it has a map (Fig 1) that purports to show "the bluestone sources" but which is actually fraudulent, suggesting wrongly that spotted dolerite, rhyolite and unspotted dolerite megaliths have definitively come from Carn Goedog, Rhosyfelin and Cerrigmarchogion and could not have come from anywhere else. That's extraordinary. And it gets worse. 

One of the two "geology" paragraphs consists of a somewhat ludicrous attempt to demonstrate that the unspotted dolerite stones "left behind" at Waun Mawn "compare well" with the unspotted dolerite stones at Stonehenge, which are actually of different sizes.  And the Waun Mawn stones are of different sizes too.  So there we are then. And it's argued that stone hole 91 at Waun Mawn probably held Stonehenge stone 62 in an earlier incarnation, in spite of the fact that the stone profile is not actually the same as the "imprint" left in pit 91. (Stone 62 is four-sided and symmetrical, and imprint 91 is five-sided and unsymmetrical.)

Now to the ultimate absurdity.  To quote: "The four surviving stones at Waun Mawn are of unspotted dolerite, and possibly derive from outcrops 3km to the south-east at Cerrigmarchogion on the Preseli ridge (Bevins et al. 2014). The only indication of the geology of the monoliths removed from the six other stoneholes was provided by a stone flake left by the standing stone with the pentagonal base (Figure 8). This flake of unspotted dolerite lay on the edge of the ramp, having become detached either during the erection or removal of the monolith. The monolith probably came from the same source on the ridge to the south-east as the unspotted dolerite pillars at both Stonehenge and Waun Mawn."

Not to put too fine a point on it, that is utter tosh.  No evidence has ever been provided that there is any link with Cerrigmarchogion or with the "ridge to the south-east".  And, to my amazement,  there is not the slightest indication that the authors of this paper (including two professional geologists) were aware that there are outcrops of unspotted dolerite in the immediate vicinity of Waun Mawn, and that boulders, slabs and pillars of unspotted dolerite litter the landscape. Could it be that the two geologists have never examined the area themselves?  Could it be that they have not even looked at the publicly-available geology map? (I can't believe that, since Richard Bevins knows the geology of this area better than anybody else.)   What does that say about their professional competence?  Why did they allow this paragraph to appear in the published article?  I'll be generous, and  suggest that they were dealing with a senior author who simply over-rode any objections or comments that his co-authors might have raised during the exchange of drafts........... Anyway, if I was one of the two geologists involved in this fiasco, I would be pretty furious with the boss.

So I assert here, on the record, that the four unspotted dolerite "monoliths" found at Waun Mawn (one standing and the other three recumbent) were in all probability simply used where they were found.  I also assert that any other smaller stones that might have been used in past settings were also derived locally, and that if they were taken away they were probably used in the other stone settings on the neighbouring moorland.  If anybody has a scrap of evidence that might contradict these assertions,  I would be only too pleased to hear of it, and of course I will publish it.