Waun Mawn -- tis but a scratch!

 

With the appearance of the new Waun Mawn paper and the demise of the fantasy that MPP and his colleagues have been flagging up for a decade or more, it's worth reflecting for a moment on what the authors have NOT done.

1.  They have not apologised for a vanity project (as Tony rightly calls it) or for a vast piece of interpretative inflation which has misled many thousands of people who love Stonehenge and its story.

2.  They have not acknowledged that there were dissenting voices from the beginning, with many of us warning them that the evidence just did not stack up.

3.  They have not cited my major contribution to the Waun Mawn debate - namely the article called "Waun Mawn and the search for proto-Stonehenge" published almost 18 months ago on Researchgate and now read by almost 5,000 people.  (They will probably argue that they only cite peer-reviewed material and will ignore the fact that they frequently cite references which are not in standard learned journals.)

4.  They have not retracted their belief in a "giant lost circle" at Waun Mawn, and refer several times to eight missing stones in spite of the scepticism expressed by Pitts, Darvill and others.

5.  They have still not studied the geology of the Waun Mawn area, and in searching for the provenance of the Waun Mawn stones and fragments they have sampled only tors and smaller crags from which stones might have been fetched.  This is a somewhat bizarre and unscientific assumption.

6.  They have not changed their views on the "bluestone quarries" at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog, and insist in referring to them as established facts while failing to mention that they too are disputed.

7.  They have not accepted that their radiocarbon dating evidence from the investigated sites is so poor that it falsifies their hypotheses rather than supporting them -- and they pretend that they have sound radiocarbon evidence for a "quarrying episode".  

8.  By concentrating on a few unspotted dolerite fragments from site 91 in the Waun Mawn excavations, and pretending that these are somehow exceptional, they  fail to acknowledge that the whole landscape and its superficial deposits are littered with bits and pieces of locally derived unspotted dolerite.  This has been pointed out to them over and again, but they do not pay attention.......

9.  The authors have demonstrated in this article that they have just not done enough local fieldwork to do justice to a project on this scale.  That might sound strange, given the manpower thrown at three seasons of digging and at many sampling trips for geological analyses, but it is blatantly obvious from this paper.  

10.  And finally, the authors do not acknowledge any role for natural processes either in the shaping of the Waun Mawn landscape, in the formation of the local sediment sequence, or indeed in the moving of lumps of stone.  Their naivety in matters geomorphological explains some of the spectacular errors they have made in their bluestone provenancing work.

All in all, I am not very impressed.  This is yet another paper that is technically skilled but very unscientific.  As usual, it is packed with unsupported and unsupportable assumptions which should have been picked up in any decent refereeing process.

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PS.  Here is my somewhat more sober (and scientific) assessment of what  the evidence on the ground at Waun Mawn actually shows:

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