Stonehenge had no purpose, and it was not really all that important.......... so says MPP

Stonehenge -- an anachronism, and just a speck in a landscape of more significant Early Neolithic features?

It's hard to keep up with MPP's mental gymnastics.  In his latest contribution he simply dumps a range of his previous fondly held beliefs and replaces them with beliefs that are much less spectacular.  One climb down after another, with no fanfare and not even any acknowledgement of the publications that have proved his earlier ideas to have been fanciful and downright misleading.

The details:  Parker Pearson, M. 2023.  Stonehenge -- the Little "Big Other".  Jnl of Urban Archaeology 7 (2023) pp 147-168 

https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/epdf/10.1484/J.JUA.5.133454?role=tab

It's a very strange article.  First, the things that he is hanging on to.  He still thinks that 80 or so bluestones were imported (in the context of a gigantic civil engineering and logistics exercise)  to Stonehenge from West Wales.  He still thinks there were monolith quarries at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  He still believes in Bluestonehenge, complete with bluestones.  He still thinks there were bluestone monoliths in the Aubrey Holes.  He still thinks that Stonehenge was built where it is because of those mysterious "periglacial stripes" that happened to be pointing in the right direction.

As for the rest, there are major shifts.  There is no mention of the famous "Lost Circle" at Waun Mawn, and it looks as if he has finally come to terms with the fact that there is no evidence for it that stacks up.  There is no mention of any cosmogenic / isotope evidence linking West Wales and Stonehenge, and he appears to have accepted that the evidence -- such as it is -- simply suggests that some people and animals and people might have come to Stonehenge from somewhere in western or northern Britain.  That's exactly what many of us have been telling him. Following the energetic criticism fired in his direction by Barclay and Brophy, he seems to have dropped the idea that Stonehenge was a "central place" or the great focal point of the British Neolithic and has substituted the idea that it was a "peripheral place" with no catchment or hinterland, located on a boundary between adjacent tribal territories.  It was a part of an extensive ceremonial landscape -- but no more important than many other locations.  It was not a temple, and it appears to have had no purpose.  (Yes, he actually says that.......)  Yes, people were cremated or buried there, as they were in many other locations.  So it was one of many little "Big Others".

Back to the strangeness.  He claims that what flowed into Stonehenge were monoliths, tools, corpses and ashes and other THINGS, and what flowed out were IDEAS -- namely ideological power and religious fervour.  And it gets even stranger.  Stonehenge's meaning was in its making, from one phase to another -- and not in its finished form.  Holes dug at Stonehenge were part of  "an iconoclastic act to challenge the monument's symbolism of ancestral unity."  And the intention in its initial construction was to unite and resolve conflict between territorial groups.

But if Stonehenge was really just a sort of insignificant folly on the chalklands of Middle England, no more distinguished than hundreds of other little "Big Other" places, why on earth would our heroic Neolithic ancestors have wanted to drag 80 bluestone monoliths to this somewhat chaotic construction site all the way from West Wales?  Because they liked to do illogical and irrational things?  

What on earth is MPP on about, and where is all this heading?  Excuse me -- I have to go and lie down in a darkened room for a little while...........