Waun Mawn -- the next chapter: peat bogs, more stone circles and a mighty exodus

Wait for it, folks.  We already know what the 2021 diggers are instructed to find.  It's all there in print, and the next chapter of the story is already written.

This is from one of many reports based on the UCL press release during the spring of 2021: 

Sometime after 3000 BC, the people living near Waun Maun left — there's little evidence of habitation in the area after about 3400 BC, according to Parker Pearson. "It's as if they just vanished," he says. "Maybe most of the people migrated, taking their stones — their ancestral identities — with them, to start again in this other special place. This extraordinary event may also have served to unite the peoples of east and west Britain."

Analyses of plant and animal remains at Stonehenge indicate that the people who built it spent their early years on the Welsh coast, providing evidence, says Pollard, that "We've got regular contact between the two regions."

Parker Pearson suggests that maybe the people who built Stonehenge incorporated the bluestones from Waun Mawn for one of two reasons: to have something of their former home in their new one, or to use the bluestones as symbols of their authority, thus entitling it to respect and power among their new neighbors.

In any event, Pearson suspects there's more to the story. Waun Mawn's stones may not be the only transplants at Stonehenge:

"With an estimated 80 bluestones put up on Salisbury Plain at Stonehenge and nearby Bluestonehenge, my guess is that Waun Mawn was not the only stone circle that contributed to Stonehenge. Maybe there are more in Preseli waiting to be found. Who knows? Someone might be lucky enough to find them."

So there was a spectacular depopulation 5,000 years ago, and was it associated with a plague or with climatic deterioration?  Or was there a huge migration or exodus, leaving West Wales effectively as a barren wilderness?  In their big chapter on the Neolithic and Bronze Age (in the new Pembrokeshire County History) Darvill and Wainwright make no mention of such an event, referring only to a subtle and gradual transition as old cultures evolved into newer ones.  I would say that the jury is still out on that one -- see this:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/02/before-beaker-hordes.html 

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/04/was-there-neolithic-mass-exodus-from.html

Anyway, as Tony reported in one of his comments, some serious pollen analysis is on the cards for this September dig, designed to demonstrate the "emptying of the landscape" around 5,000 years ago, when everybody supposedly trundled off to Salisbury Plain.  As we know, the archaeologists are very keen to see the "onset of blanket bog peat development" as significant in the evolution of settlement in this area -- and indeed as related to the imagined lifting and export of desirable stones from local stone circles.

I'm not sure that blanket peat bogs ever were very extensive in this area, at altitudes below 300m, and the anthropogenic origins of peat development are contentious, to put it mildly.  To quote Gallego-Sala et al (citations removed):

There has been considerable debate about the cause of Holocene blanket-bog initiation in the UK. There is a long-standing hypothesis, first proposed by Moore (1973), that it was a consequence of land use by Neolithic human populations, and in particular land clearing practices at the time of the “elm decline” (often taken as a stratigraphic marker of Neolithic land use), as well as heavy stock grazing that changed the soil hydrological balance enough to initiate the inception of blanket bogs between about 6000 and 5000 yr BP . Evidence of removal of the shrub and/or tree cover by fire at the onset of blanket bog formation, and pollen analytical studies suggesting intensive agricultural practices by Neolithic people support this hypothesis. A recent investigation of initiation of upland blanket bogs in Ireland also pointed to land use as a principal cause of paludification. However, a number of authors have suggested the initiation of blanket bogs at specific locations solely as a result of a climatic shift during the mid Holocene “Atlantic” period in Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Ireland. Tipping (2008) suggested that farming communities only settled in the Scottish Highlands after the landscape had already been covered by blanket bogs. Other authors have adopted a more complex view in which both climatic shifts and human activities played a role. Soil-forming processes, including leaching of base cations and consequent acidification and podsolization of soils, were also proposed to have been influential, giving rise to the term “pedogenic peats”.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cpd-11-4811-2015

A much-reproduced graph of Holocene temperature variations.  A "warmer episode" between 8,000 and 5,000 years ago is now broadly accepted and is well supported by the evidence.  After 5,000 yrs BP there was a gradual cooling -- but there was no "tipping point" or catastrophic climatic event capable of triggering a mass migration eastwards from West Wales.

I suspect that whatever the results of the 2021 palynological work may be, Parker Pearson and his colleagues are going to get into a frightful tangle over this one...........