Bluestone science makes a huge advance, backwards

In some discussion about the bluestones generally and the Altar Stone in particular, on social media, somebody posted this the other day:  "What better way to get both your publication rate and citation rate up than to start arguing with yourself! Genius!"

I agree.  This is incredibly clever.  The bluestone geologists (we all know who they are) seem to have developed this brilliant new technique of writing a flood of papers, completely ignoring the published opinions of all who say anything inconvenient, and then writing more papers in which they disagree with themselves.

It happened with the "Neolithic" quarrying articles in the years following 2015, when they ignored two key peer-reviewed articles (written by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and myself) because we accepted hardly any of their extravagant claims.  They ignored other evidence published on Researchgate relating to Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  They were 100% focussed on shouting from the rooftops about "the Pompeii of Neolithic quarries" and about "monolith extraction on an industrial scale".  Since then they have rowed back significantly from those claims, and while they still claim to have discovered quarries they have had to accept that maybe one or two stones might have been moved from the sites about which they got so excited.  All the other stones at Stonehenge have probably, they now say,  come from other sites -- some of those not associated with Mynydd Preseli.  Needless to say, even that revised position is disputed. 

It happened in the Waun Mawn "Lost Circle" fiasco, in which they flagged up an amazing "discovery" backed up with state-of-the-science analytical techniques and then used high profile media promotion to sell it to the world.  The "learned" papers and ancillary popular articles are there for all to see.  Before going into print, they ignored the research findings and the opinions of others who know the territory far better than they do, and basked in the media glory while the going was good.  Then they ignored the criticisms of their papers, which included detailed scrutiny of their evidence.  Then they "discovered" in new articles that their previous findings were unreliable,  that none of the stones at Stonehenge had come from Waun Mawn, that the stones used in the "Lost Circle" were all locally derived, and that the Lost Circle never existed anyway. And so, they said, all things considered, there was no link of any sort between Waun Mawn and Stonehenge.  Big deal -- we all knew that anyway.

And now it has happened again. Shocking new research!!   Having said in a big paper in "Nature" journal that the Altar Stone had come from the Orcadian Basin and having implied that the prime "provenancing candidate" was Orkney, the geologists got massive global media coverage   -- which of course happens several times a year when somebody or other publishes something claimed to rewrite the text books and to "overturn the established Stonehenge narrative....."    You know the sort of thing.......  Well, blow me down, the ink on the Sun's banner headlines had hardly dried when along comes another paper written by, among others, the very same three geological musketeers, and saying that the Altar Stone had nothing whatsoever to do with Orkney..........

As I have noted before, this pantomime is portrayed (by those involved) as excellent science in which top experts assemble evidence, create hypotheses, test them and reject or replace them.  That's all very fine, but this is not excellent science at all -- it involves rushing into print with dramatic conclusions based on very scanty evidence, a refusal to acknowledge that the conclusions and even the evidence itself is hotly disputed, and an apparent determination to ignore all evidence that is inconvenient to the hypothesis being promoted.  The work involves biased sampling, failure to test field findings against control digs, assumptions dressed up as facts, and the ongoing use of ruling hypotheses.  I am not the only one who is less than impressed..........

Is this all deliberate?  Or can it really be the case that these guys do not have a clue what they are doing?