Britain's Pompeii -- what, again?

There's a big push to promote the Must Farm findings as of vast importance for our understanding of Bronze Age Britain.  And there is the Pompeii comparison.  With some justification, I think, since the finds really are spectacular........

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-68608467?fbclid=IwAR03huiAZkzDQl2PEjKVWj33-eIo9CnN5nLOG1TfBOhKWoYq5ECQe7NchP0

 Some of the charred remains on the Must Farm "Bronze Age village" site

But wait a minute -- haven't we heard this sort of thing before?  Why yes -- none other than our old friend MPP used the Pompeii comparison when talking about Rhosyfelin and its supposed quarry.  A reminder of ancient history. At the end of the September 2011digging season Mike announced to the world that the "Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" had been found, at a location given to him by geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer.  He repeated this phrase in his 2012 book, on a section about Rhosyfelin between pages 286 and 291. After the bit about Pompeii, MPP said: "We could hardly believe our luck. This was a smoking gun; the game was up for anyone still trying to argue that the bluestones were not quarries in Preseli during the Neolithic, and then taken to Wiltshire." 

Ah, youthful enthusiasm knows no bounds -- and who cares about a spot of hyperbole when you are among friends?  Perhaps a little more caution might have been in order, but MPP and his colleagues don't do caution.

Anyway, the Pompeii comparison always was preposterous, since it implies a find that reveals a huge amount of data about the culture, life style, clothing, social order, economy, belief system, etc of a whole community that was wiped out in a catastrophe.  I can understand the use of the term with respect to Must Farm, because there a catastrophic fire wiped everything out and brought habitation of the site to 
an end. Not on quite the same scale as Pompeii and the volcanic eruption of 79 AD, maybe, but the metaphor is a good one.  And as for Rhosyfelin? Well, there never was a quarry there, of course, and what has the site told us about the community that lived in North Pembs during the Neolithic? It has told us that over a long period of time people used to come into the valley of the river Brynberian for a spot of berry picking, hunting and fishing. It's a very pretty location, with a rocky crag, birds singing in the woods, bright sunshine inn the summer and shelter from the wind and rain in the winter. The locals certainly lit camp fires there, so at times they might have stayed overnight. They might have eaten hazel nuts and blackberries. They might have taken some sharp edged bits of rhyolite and used them as cutting or scraping tools. And that's it. The same could be said of multiple sites all over the northern part of Pembrokeshire, which remain unexamined by the archaeologists. So to claim any sort of uniqueness or cultural significance for Rhosyfelin is quite frankly absurd.