Prehistoric Landscape change around Preseli. New paper shows nothing new.

I'm not able to get at this because it is behind a paywall, but I'm not losing any sleep over it, because it clearly shows that Preseli was not abandoned or depopulated at all, following the presumed export of the bluestones.  It was a daft idea anyway -- one of a host of daft ideas promoted by our oild friend MPP over the years.  The "pastoral indicators" indicated for the Early and Middle Neolithic were perfectly predictable and clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge or the bluestones, and it would be flying in the face of common sense to pretend otherwise.

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Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito.
Environmental Archaeology 2025, Received 29 Apr 2025, Accepted 09 Oct 2025, Published online: 19 Oct 2025

https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

ABSTRACT

This palaeoenvironmental investigation into prehistoric landscape change was set in the Preseli region of Pembrokeshire, west Wales from where Stonehenge’s bluestones originate. It aimed to investigate whether the movement of bluestones to Stonehenge, considered to have formed Stonehenge’s first stage c. 3000 BC, was accompanied by an out-migration of people, leaving the Preseli region largely uninhabited in succeeding centuries until c. 2200 BC. Potentially, this might be reflected in the palaeoecological record by a reduction in anthropogenic land-use indicators. Detailed analyses that involved pollen, macrofossil, non-pollen palynomorph (NPP), loss-on-ignition (LOI550) and stratigraphical investigations of multipleö core sequences from heathland on the slopes of the Preseli Hills, in combination with archaeological spot samples from five prehistoric sites in the locality, were undertaken. This multi-core and multi-site approach has allowed for an interpretation of local environmental change from the Early Holocene to the Late Bronze Age. An insight into human population dynamics has been gained in an area where palaeoecological investigations have traditionally been hampered by a lack of deep peat sequences. The Mesolithic and Neolithic were largely dominated by woodland species while increases in pastoral indicators began during the Early – Middle Neolithic contemporary with activity at important bluestone sites. Significant expansion of pastoral and arable farming did not occur until the Late Bronze Age. However, despite a scarcity of archaeological remains from c. 3000–2200 BC, the presence of cereal pollen during this interval hints at a continued human presence in the landscape after the transportation of the bluestones.