What's Waun Mawn doing in a new book about Stonehenge?

 

https://www.sidestone.com/books/stonehenge-for-the-ancestors-part-2

It's good to welcome a new book on Stonehenge, published by Sidestone Press and kindly made available for free viewing online.  It's a bulky tome of 388 pages, nicely laid out and beautifully illustrated, with 11 chapters, reference list and index.  A lot of work has gone into it, although the contents are predictable, being based on a lot of material already in print. It's up to date too, with some 2022 references incorporated.

That having been said, it's clear that some recent revisions have been made, but that most of the text was written at least a year ago.  The lead time for book publishing is very long.......

Given that there are signs of recent editing and text adjustments, why has Waun Mawn not been completely removed from the text, following the geological papers published in June by Pearce et al (1922) and Bevins et al (2022)?  It should not be in this book at all.  Those papers demonstrated conclusively the correctness of what many of us have been saying for several years -- that there is nothing at Waun Mawn to connect it in any way with Stonehenge.  It's not even connected physically or in terms of geology with the so-called (and unproven) "bluestone quarries" at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.

And yet here we are again -- multiple references to Waun Mawn in the text, accompanied by maps and diagrams.  MPP and his merry band cannot bear to let go of it.  They keep on referring to it as "a dismantled and unfinished stone circle".  In the text the only grounds they can now find for connecting it in some way with Stonehenge are the supposed circle diameter (110m, for assumed stone holes at Waun Mawn and an embankment at Stonehenge);  and the supposed similarities in the radiocarbon dating evidence, using carefully selected dates while ignoring all the others.

I can't be bothered to pick apart the assumptions and speculations relating to Waun Mawn; but will simply mention that Cerrig Lladron is NOT definitively shown to the the source of the Waun Mawn stones, and that Ireland is NOT visible from Waun Mawn.  The rather feeble argument that "Waun Mawn was part of a ceremonial complex" that had links with Stonehenge, which somehow means that the two places were linked, can also be dismissed.

Then we have the usual vast interpretative inflation that so infuriates other archaeologists:  ""It was only around 3,000 BC, with the bringing of bluestones from the Preseli hills of SW Wales to Salisbury Plain, that its (Stonehenge's) exceptional character was fully realised.  The bluestone circle of Stonehenge Stage 1 embodied a unification of ancestral identities with SW Wales."

All this, yet again, based on zero evidence and a febrile imagination.