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Lost Circle Day
On 12th February 2021 a paper was published in the journal “Antiquity” with the title “The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales”. It was authored by thirteen academics under the leadership of Prof Mike Parker Pearson from the University College London Institute of Archaeology. The same authorship group had been involved in a ten-year project investigating “bluestone monolith quarries” in the Preseli district, and in a string of earlier papers and popular magazine articles. Prior to publication there were many leaks and tweets, calculated to heighten the expectation -- among members of the "informed public" -- of a bombshell to come. On the date of publication there was a tightly coordinated media blitz, following an embargo, involving press and web-based news organizations all over the world. On the same day, and following sophisticated advance publicity, BBC TV transmitted a one-hour documentary introduced by Prof Alice Roberts, entitled “The Lost Circle” and casting Prof Parker Pearson as a latter-day Indiana Jones struggling against all the odds to find his Holy Grail — namely a giant stone circle in the depths of the rain-lashed hills of Mynydd Preseli. The narrative was breathlessly admiring, and the tone of the programme was calculated to be as dramatic and heroic as possible.
Members of the public responded — as expected — with wonderment, as they do when a major “solving Stonehenge” article appears, several times every year. But in specialist circles the response was much more muted, with experts on social media commenting “Nice story, but can we please have some evidence instead of speculation?”
I have been pondering on just how easy it is, in this day and age, to perpetrate scientific fraud -- and even a cynical hoax -- by taking advantage of the insatiable desire of the media for spectacular stories and recognising the extraordinary gullibility of the general public. In previous posts on this blog I have outlined the essential requirements for a successful hoax:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-bluestone-quarries-great.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2010/03/two-great-hoaxes-piltdown-skull-and.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2013/03/is-bluestone-myth-based-on-scientific.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2010/03/herbert-thomas-and-charles-dawson.html
We won't get more involved with hoaxes right now, but it has occurred to me that what you really need, as an ambitious hoaxer, is an academic context in which critical scrutiny is suspended and material gets published because of the reputations of the authors rather than on the basis of scientific or academic worth.
The Stonehenge bluestone myth or hoax has been perpetrated not just with the connivance of the Editor of "Antiquity" journal (see below) but with the active support of scores of other editors and peer reviewers as well.
I have no idea how many journal editors have turned down "bluestone" papers submitted by Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins and others, but the following journals have all helped to spread the myth: Journal of Archaeological Science, Plos One, Science Advances, Archaeology International, Proceedings of the Geologists Association, Archaeology in Wales, British Archaeology, Geology Today, The Conversation, Wilts Arch and Nat Hist Mag, Current Archaeology, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, Archaeology Magazine, New Scientist, Science, National Geographic..... and many more. Virtually all of the mainstream press (Times, Mail, Express, Guardian, Sun) and popular magazines have run special features, based on UCL and other press releases. Many of the journals have published articles by members of the Parker Pearson research team -- including many perfectly competent and valuable geology papers which have in my view been devalued because the authors could not resist making quite gratuitous references to quarrying and human monolith transport while seeking to flag up the "significance" of their finds. In that regard the geologists have been unwise, and the peer reviewers and editors have been negligent in allowing these bits of over-interpretation and "myth promotion" to spoil otherwise meticulous bits of geological work.
There is no doubt that there is herd mentality at work here. If something is being promoted heavily enough by a very determined group of academics, and all the other journals and media outlets are helping to cover their story, you have to be a part of it too.
So no part of the media wants to be left behind. They all suspend their disbelief, reservations are set aside, and the hoax is perpetrated by almost everybody.
In a bizarre sort of way, it's all rather fascinating........... until, of course, people start to realise that the evidence just does not stack up, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
That's where we are right now. We live in interesting times. The idea of "orthostat removal on an industrial scale" at Carn Goedog has been abandoned. It has been admitted that if there ever was a quarry at Rhosyfelin, maybe only one bluestone orthostat was ever removed from there. There was no giant stone circle at Waun Mawn. There was no preferential use of spotted dolerite or foliated rhyolite in stone settings anywhere. Waun Mawn had nothing whatsoever to do with Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog. There was no link between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge. The number of Stonehenge bluestone provenances creeps ever upwards, and is now around 46 -- and that in itself renders the idea of bluestone monolith quarrying redundant. The radiocarbon and OSL dates from all three sites falsify the narrative developed by MPP and his team. And so it goes on.
Self-delusion or self-deception? This is the Wikipedia explanation of the latter:
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception.
That makes a lot of sense when you look at the behaviour of the team responsible for the "bluestone myth" -- since the members of the team have persistently, over a decade or more, refused to admit that any of their ideas are disputed, and have failed to cite any "inconvenient" evidence. So in that case we might actually feel sorry for them rather than being angry. But then we realise that the bluestone myth has been very heavily promoted, using all the marketing techniques in the book, with the connivance of large segments of the archaeological community and the media. In the face of abundant warnings about the poor quality of their evidence, the team has persisted with aggressive marketing, and should we simply interpret that as demonstrating naivety, bloody mindedness, stubbornness or ignorance? Was there, or was there not, an ongoing and premeditated intention to deceive?
To quote Wikipedia again:
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
Whereas the promoters of frauds, fakes, and scams devise them so that they will withstand the highest degree of scrutiny customary in the affair, hoaxers are confident, justifiably or not, that their representations will receive no scrutiny at all. They have such confidence because their representations belong to a world of notions fundamental to the victims' views of reality, but whose truth and importance they accept without argument or evidence, and so never question.
Some hoaxers intend eventually to unmask their representations as in fact a hoax so as to expose their victims as fools; seeking some form of profit, other hoaxers hope to maintain the hoax indefinitely, so that it is only when sceptical persons willing to investigate their claims publish their findings that at last they stand revealed as hoaxers.
I rest my case.
============
"Antiquity" Editorials
Antiquity , Volume 89 , Issue 348 , December 2015 , pp. 1281 - 1286
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.182
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/editorial/015836F57855E6A32CD89E66F5272E5C
.......... Mike Parker Pearson and his team have been excavating a bluestone quarry at Craig Rhos-y-Felin.This is an impressive site, with good evidence for the extraction and removal of megalithic blocks. It is interesting also for its rarity value. Despite the many hundreds of surviving megalithic monuments in western and northern Europe, very few quarries have been located. One such is known from Orkney, and there are others in Brittany and the Alentejo, but they are much rarer than might be expected. Megalithic blocks often appear unshaped, and that might lead us to suppose that the stones were generally collected from surface scatters and detached boulders. It is difficult for us now to visualise the appearance of west European landscapes thousands of years ago, before farmers cleared away the stones. What is surprising, given that detached blocks must have been widely available, is that so many stones, including a good number of the Stonehenge bluestones, were evidently quarried from the bedrock. With sites such as Craig Rhos-y-Felin, we can begin to see exactly how that was done.
Antiquity , Volume 95 , Issue 379, February 2021 , pp. 1 - 12
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.254
..........moving Stonehenge might have precedent. In this issue of Antiquity, Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues present new results that suggest the monument may have had an earlier construction phase—in south-west Wales. We have known for a century that the bluestones of Stonehenge originated in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire. In their article, however, the authors argue that it was not simply stones that were transported from Wales to Wiltshire. Investigations at Waun Mawn near the bluestone quarry sites of Craig Rhos-y-Felin and Carn Goedog have identified a dismantled stone circle of early date and sharing similarities with Stonehenge in terms of size and solstitial alignment, as well as the shape and geological provenance of some of the dolerite pillars. Combining their new data with recent isotope studies, the authors suggest that the first stage of the Stonehenge we know today may have been built by Neolithic migrants from Wales, who brought with them not just stones with which to create a new monument, but rather elements of an existing monument to be re-created on Salisbury Plain.
==============================
The structure and quality of the Antiquity papers
There is no doubt that there is herd mentality at work here. If something is being promoted heavily enough by a very determined group of academics, and all the other journals and media outlets are helping to cover their story, you have to be a part of it too.
So no part of the media wants to be left behind. They all suspend their disbelief, reservations are set aside, and the hoax is perpetrated by almost everybody.
In a bizarre sort of way, it's all rather fascinating........... until, of course, people start to realise that the evidence just does not stack up, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
That's where we are right now. We live in interesting times. The idea of "orthostat removal on an industrial scale" at Carn Goedog has been abandoned. It has been admitted that if there ever was a quarry at Rhosyfelin, maybe only one bluestone orthostat was ever removed from there. There was no giant stone circle at Waun Mawn. There was no preferential use of spotted dolerite or foliated rhyolite in stone settings anywhere. Waun Mawn had nothing whatsoever to do with Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog. There was no link between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge. The number of Stonehenge bluestone provenances creeps ever upwards, and is now around 46 -- and that in itself renders the idea of bluestone monolith quarrying redundant. The radiocarbon and OSL dates from all three sites falsify the narrative developed by MPP and his team. And so it goes on.
Self-delusion or self-deception? This is the Wikipedia explanation of the latter:
Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception.
That makes a lot of sense when you look at the behaviour of the team responsible for the "bluestone myth" -- since the members of the team have persistently, over a decade or more, refused to admit that any of their ideas are disputed, and have failed to cite any "inconvenient" evidence. So in that case we might actually feel sorry for them rather than being angry. But then we realise that the bluestone myth has been very heavily promoted, using all the marketing techniques in the book, with the connivance of large segments of the archaeological community and the media. In the face of abundant warnings about the poor quality of their evidence, the team has persisted with aggressive marketing, and should we simply interpret that as demonstrating naivety, bloody mindedness, stubbornness or ignorance? Was there, or was there not, an ongoing and premeditated intention to deceive?
To quote Wikipedia again:
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
Whereas the promoters of frauds, fakes, and scams devise them so that they will withstand the highest degree of scrutiny customary in the affair, hoaxers are confident, justifiably or not, that their representations will receive no scrutiny at all. They have such confidence because their representations belong to a world of notions fundamental to the victims' views of reality, but whose truth and importance they accept without argument or evidence, and so never question.
Some hoaxers intend eventually to unmask their representations as in fact a hoax so as to expose their victims as fools; seeking some form of profit, other hoaxers hope to maintain the hoax indefinitely, so that it is only when sceptical persons willing to investigate their claims publish their findings that at last they stand revealed as hoaxers.
I rest my case.
============
"Antiquity" Editorials
Antiquity , Volume 89 , Issue 348 , December 2015 , pp. 1281 - 1286
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.182
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/editorial/015836F57855E6A32CD89E66F5272E5C
.......... Mike Parker Pearson and his team have been excavating a bluestone quarry at Craig Rhos-y-Felin.This is an impressive site, with good evidence for the extraction and removal of megalithic blocks. It is interesting also for its rarity value. Despite the many hundreds of surviving megalithic monuments in western and northern Europe, very few quarries have been located. One such is known from Orkney, and there are others in Brittany and the Alentejo, but they are much rarer than might be expected. Megalithic blocks often appear unshaped, and that might lead us to suppose that the stones were generally collected from surface scatters and detached boulders. It is difficult for us now to visualise the appearance of west European landscapes thousands of years ago, before farmers cleared away the stones. What is surprising, given that detached blocks must have been widely available, is that so many stones, including a good number of the Stonehenge bluestones, were evidently quarried from the bedrock. With sites such as Craig Rhos-y-Felin, we can begin to see exactly how that was done.
Antiquity , Volume 95 , Issue 379, February 2021 , pp. 1 - 12
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.254
..........moving Stonehenge might have precedent. In this issue of Antiquity, Mike Parker Pearson and colleagues present new results that suggest the monument may have had an earlier construction phase—in south-west Wales. We have known for a century that the bluestones of Stonehenge originated in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire. In their article, however, the authors argue that it was not simply stones that were transported from Wales to Wiltshire. Investigations at Waun Mawn near the bluestone quarry sites of Craig Rhos-y-Felin and Carn Goedog have identified a dismantled stone circle of early date and sharing similarities with Stonehenge in terms of size and solstitial alignment, as well as the shape and geological provenance of some of the dolerite pillars. Combining their new data with recent isotope studies, the authors suggest that the first stage of the Stonehenge we know today may have been built by Neolithic migrants from Wales, who brought with them not just stones with which to create a new monument, but rather elements of an existing monument to be re-created on Salisbury Plain.
==============================
The structure and quality of the Antiquity papers
The three papers have been heavily criticised because they are badly organized, because they tell the readers what to think before they have been presented with any evidence, because they mix up speculations and facts to the point where they are inextricable, because they ignore all inconvenient evidence, and because they fail to cite other peer reviewed papers that call into question the authors' interpretations. To be more specific, here are the criticisms of the Waun Mawn paper published in 2021.
In summary:
1. The paper fails to describe the local geology properly, and as a consequence the reader is misled into believing that any stones used at Waun Mawn must have been imported from “quarries” located elsewhere. That is a very serious matter.
2. The paper fails to describe the landscape and cultural prehistoric setting at Waun Mawn, and so misleads the reader into thinking that the proposed “giant stone circle” at this site is in some way unusual or significant.
3. The paper fails to lay out the evidence in an impartial or objective manner, and mixes up evidence and interpretations to an unacceptable extent.
4. No material evidence is provided to show that the “sockets” or “stone holes” are not simply natural features in a pitted ground surface.
5. There are no control studies from the surrounding landscape, and consequently “artificial significance” is attached to the supposed stone circle.
6. The six “stone holes” are presumed to have similarities with the Aubrey Holes and other sockets at Stonehenge, but they are (as pointed out by Mike Pitts) too small and too shallow to have held substantial standing stones.
7. The radiocarbon and OSL dating evidence is ”cherry picked” in an unacceptable fashion in order to support a ruling hypothesis.
8. The paper misleads on the likely geological provenancing of the four unspotted dolerite boulders currently located at the site.
9. There are no adequate descriptions of sediment types, including “stone hole fills”, parent materials, broken bedrock and glacial till.
10. The paper simply claims a “solsticial alignment” but provides no accurate data which can be used to evaluate the claim.
11. The paper fails to cite or consider other published papers which are fully relevant to the matter in hand.
12. The paper misrepresents the strontium and other isotope evidence which is already in print and which does NOT demonstrate an unequivocal human or animal link between Preseli and Stonehenge.
In summary:
1. The paper fails to describe the local geology properly, and as a consequence the reader is misled into believing that any stones used at Waun Mawn must have been imported from “quarries” located elsewhere. That is a very serious matter.
2. The paper fails to describe the landscape and cultural prehistoric setting at Waun Mawn, and so misleads the reader into thinking that the proposed “giant stone circle” at this site is in some way unusual or significant.
3. The paper fails to lay out the evidence in an impartial or objective manner, and mixes up evidence and interpretations to an unacceptable extent.
4. No material evidence is provided to show that the “sockets” or “stone holes” are not simply natural features in a pitted ground surface.
5. There are no control studies from the surrounding landscape, and consequently “artificial significance” is attached to the supposed stone circle.
6. The six “stone holes” are presumed to have similarities with the Aubrey Holes and other sockets at Stonehenge, but they are (as pointed out by Mike Pitts) too small and too shallow to have held substantial standing stones.
7. The radiocarbon and OSL dating evidence is ”cherry picked” in an unacceptable fashion in order to support a ruling hypothesis.
8. The paper misleads on the likely geological provenancing of the four unspotted dolerite boulders currently located at the site.
9. There are no adequate descriptions of sediment types, including “stone hole fills”, parent materials, broken bedrock and glacial till.
10. The paper simply claims a “solsticial alignment” but provides no accurate data which can be used to evaluate the claim.
11. The paper fails to cite or consider other published papers which are fully relevant to the matter in hand.
12. The paper misrepresents the strontium and other isotope evidence which is already in print and which does NOT demonstrate an unequivocal human or animal link between Preseli and Stonehenge.
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