Here is a really weird piece of news. On 8 June 2022 it was announced that the Waun Mawn research team had been awarded the Ben Cullen Antiquity Prize for "outstanding" Stonehenge-related research in 2022. The prize -- in memory of Ben Cullen, who was a student at UCL -- is awarded in association with "Antiquity" journal, so we can only assume that the judges decided this article met all the criteria as being "Stonehenge-related" and that it was better than anything else published in the right time frame:
“The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales”. Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham, Timothy Kinnaird, DaveShaw, Ellen Simmons, Adam Stanford, Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer, Clive Ruggles, Jim Rylatt and Kevan Edinborough
Antiquity , Volume 95 , Issue 379 , February 2021 , pp. 85 - 103.
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.239
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345177590_Waun_Mawn_and_the_search_for_Proto-_Stonehenge
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345177590_Waun_Mawn_and_the_search_for_Proto-_Stonehenge
The judges might also have considered this:
Waun Mawn and Gernos-fach: the Welsh origins of Stonehenge project
Interim report of the 2021 season
By Mike Parker Pearson, Chris Casswell, Jim Rylatt, Adam Stanford, Kate Welham and Josh Pollard
https://www.sarsen.org/2022/01/waun-mawn-and-gernos-fach-welsh-origins.html?showComment=1642027777014#c2520553829533807025
How bizarre is this? The prize was announced in June -- the same month that two new papers were released which showed that all of the key assumptions and interpretations contained in the cited "Antiquity" article were incorrect. I have dealt with these papers in other posts. The geological work at Waun Mawn was demonstrably inadequate. The paper was packed with speculations dressed up as facts. The authors were apparently ignorant of local landforms, sediments and even other local surface features and megalithic monuments. The assumptions about sockets and missing stones were so dodgy that they have been criticised and questioned by all sorts of people including fellow archaeologists Darvill and Pitts. The "alignment" speculations were wildly inaccurate. Stone 62 at Stonehenge came from the far east of Preseli and had nothing to do with Waun Mawn. The monoliths and other scattered rocks at Waun Mawn are all locally derived and have no known matches with Stonehenge. The radiocarbon and other dates tell us nothing about stone circles or Stonehenge. There were no control digs. The presumed circumference of a "giant circle" was never adequately supported by evidence. There is nothing at all at Waun Mawn to demonstrate any link with Stonehenge, and the proto-Stonehenge and "lost circle" propositions are shown to be fantasies.
By Mike Parker Pearson, Chris Casswell, Jim Rylatt, Adam Stanford, Kate Welham and Josh Pollard
https://www.sarsen.org/2022/01/waun-mawn-and-gernos-fach-welsh-origins.html?showComment=1642027777014#c2520553829533807025
How bizarre is this? The prize was announced in June -- the same month that two new papers were released which showed that all of the key assumptions and interpretations contained in the cited "Antiquity" article were incorrect. I have dealt with these papers in other posts. The geological work at Waun Mawn was demonstrably inadequate. The paper was packed with speculations dressed up as facts. The authors were apparently ignorant of local landforms, sediments and even other local surface features and megalithic monuments. The assumptions about sockets and missing stones were so dodgy that they have been criticised and questioned by all sorts of people including fellow archaeologists Darvill and Pitts. The "alignment" speculations were wildly inaccurate. Stone 62 at Stonehenge came from the far east of Preseli and had nothing to do with Waun Mawn. The monoliths and other scattered rocks at Waun Mawn are all locally derived and have no known matches with Stonehenge. The radiocarbon and other dates tell us nothing about stone circles or Stonehenge. There were no control digs. The presumed circumference of a "giant circle" was never adequately supported by evidence. There is nothing at all at Waun Mawn to demonstrate any link with Stonehenge, and the proto-Stonehenge and "lost circle" propositions are shown to be fantasies.
The paper published in Antiquity has been so comprehensively discredited that it should really be retracted. And yet it is awarded a prize for academic excellence? You couldn't make it up.........
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In my updated commentary I explain why this prize-winning paper should never have been published in the first place:
The Lost Circle at Waun Mawn: a commentary (updated). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349439694_The_Lost_Circle_at_Waun_Mawn_a_commentary_updated[accessed Aug 25 2022].
2 comments:
Correction -- the Ben Cullen Prize is awarded for "outstanding research" in any field of Archaeololgy, so it is not just for Stonehenge research. It is awarded by Antiquity magazine specifically for papers published in Antiquity magazine. So it is essentially a component of the magazine's marketing activities. More and more bizarre.........
My highly-accurate CAD version of Woodhenge, based on a 2008 GPS survey, was presented for an award some years ago, but one guy who helped set it up was obviously chastised by his superiors, and in turn, chastised me too. My survey came third, which is another way of saying it got nowhere! Archaeologists refuse to accept that Woodhenge is aligned on the moon. OU too!
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