The Preseli landscape change paper scrutinized: another MPP hypothesis bites the dust

This is getting embarrassing.  The framing of the prehistory of Pembrokeshire as "an essential component of the Stonehenge narrative" always was absurd, but now, surely, it has to be consigned to the scrap heap.  Archaeologists working in West Wales always were worried about it, but by and large they have maintained a stoical silence, cowed by the immense power and influence of people like Richard Atkinson, Geoffrey Wainwright and Mike Parker Pearson..........

One after another, the hypotheses of external influence have been dismissed in the peer-reviewed literature.  First, the Craig Rhosyfelin "Stonehenge megalith quarry" flagged up as "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" and then shown to be just a figment of a fertile imagination.  Then the spotted dolerite "megalith quarry" at Carn Goedog, also flagged up as a massive industrial complex and then shown to be nothing more than a dolerite tor affected by assorted cold climate processes.  Then the magnificent "lost stone" circle at Waun Mawn, given the full treatment as the last piece of the Stonehenge jigsaw puzzle in an appalling TV documentary and then dismissed with disdain by Tim Darvill and many others.  The stone circle never existed.  Now comes the hypothesis of West Wales population decline following the removal of 80 bluestones monoliths from Preseli, via Waun Mawn, to Stonehenge during the late Neolithic.  That too bites the dust following the publication of this new study.

When you use wildly extravagant phraseology like "the IKEA of Neolithic quarries", "the original Stonehenge", "monolith extraction on an industrial scale", "proto-Stonehenge" and "a monument of unification" you are asking for trouble, especially if your evidence is so thin that it does not withstand scrutiny.........

Anyway, back to the new pollen analysis / landscape change paper.  Thanks to Daisy Spencer for sending me the PDF.  It's a real curate's egg of a paper -- excellent in parts (particularly on the data collection and analysis side) and deeply flawed in others.  One of the biggest problems is that it completely ignores one of the greatest duties placed on all researchers -- ie the duty to hear dissenting voices, to acknowledge their existence and expressions in the peer reviewed literature, and to assess what influence they might have on your conclusions.  None of my work in a string of recent papers is cited, although it is 100% relevant to the matter in hand.  There are no citations of Kellaway, Williams-Thorpe, Briggs or Darvill -- which is extraordinary.  

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito (19 Oct 2025): Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales, Environmental Archaeology, DOI:10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.257471

Over and again, assumptions and speculations are portrayed as established facts.  Some examples.

On the first line of the article the landscapes of Preseli are claimed to have been "connected since the Neolithic".   Have they really?  Not in my book they haven't.......

Then also on page 1:  "up to 80 bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain."  Speculation, not fact.

P 1:  "Bluestones were erected in the Aubrey Holes and in Bluestonehenge".  Speculation, not fact.

On p 2 there are references to "bluestone quarries", "the transportation of the bluestones" and "the Waun Mawn stone circle."    All speculation.

On p 5:  Reference to "the bluestone sites"........ and on the same page, reference is made to the empty holes used for standing stones at Waun Mawn.  All speculation.

In Table 1 on page 6, Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog are referred to (and elsewhere in the text) as "bluestone quarries."

On p 6 reference is made to a "Middle Neolithic artificial stone platform" -- that's just a figment of somebody's imagination.

On p 16 there is again a reference to "the quarrying of bluestone" -- speculation, not fact.

On p 18 in referring to Waun Mawn the authors talk of the time  "when the stones were first erected at the site."  This is just a dodgy assumption.

On p 20, the authors talk of  "the movement of c 80 bluestones from Preseli c 3000 BC."  It didn't happen, as MPP has himself conceded.

Then the conclusion:  "The pollen data does not support the abandonment of this area when the bluestones were taken to Stonehenge."  For the umpteenth time, they were NOT taken by human beings to Stonehenge.

And so we could go on.  I can excuse the authors for some of this bias, some of the time, since they were at least testing a hypothesis that needed to be stated -- but they have strayed far beyond the hypothesis and have demonstrated a naive acceptance of many very dodgy components of the narrative developed by Parker Pearson over the years.  Why did they not demonstrate a greater critical faculty?  I think we know the answer to that one.........

The fundamental flaw with this paper is that it insists on examining environmental change in West Wales strictly in the contect of a Stonehenge timeline that is assumed to be "correct" or "relevant."  What we see is a classic case of a "monument obsession"—forcing complex, independent regional data into a famous monument's box just to keep a high-profile theory on life support.  Instead of treating the Preseli landscape as an important cultural landscape in its own right, the authors have treated it as a mere supply yard for the Stonehenge builders.  When their own data proves that the local population stayed put and kept farming right through the "Stonehenge migration" window, they still choose to interpret the local story as a minor chapter in the Stonehenge narrative.    This type of framing creates a distorted view of prehistory by implying that nothing of importance happened in Neolithic Wales unless it was dictated by events in Wiltshire.

For 1782, read 3,000 BP

TO SUMMARISE:  Palynological data from the Preseli Hills reveals a narrative of local agricultural continuity, with continuous cereal cultivation and a lack of large-scale abandonment between 3000–2200 BC, contradicting theories of a mass migration to Stonehenge

The local builders were purely pragmatic. The idea that Preseli was a "sacred landscape" uniquely obsessed with bluestone—to the point where they would pack up their entire society and ship their monuments 240 kilometres away to Wiltshire—is an entirely modern invention.  The new palynological and macrofossil data proves that the people of Preseli probably knew nothing whatsoever about Stonehenge.  If there had been a monumental, multi-generational project to dismantle local stone circles, construct massive transport infrastructures, and conduct a mass migration to Salisbury Plain around 3000 BC, it would have left a catastrophic scar in the local environmental record.  Instead, the pollen cores show absolute indifference to the Stonehenge timeline. The local farming families simply carried on clearing small patches of woodland, growing their crops, and grazing their livestock according to their own domestic routines.  The records show a gradual, self-contained ecological evolution rather than a abrupt transformation, with major deforestation not appearing until the Late Bronze Age

As argued by Stephen Briggs, the Neolithic tribes of west Wales were opportunists, utilitarians and pragmatists.  They were also quite sophisticated in that they knew a great deal more about cost / benefit analysis than many modern archaeologists!

So congratulations to Daisy Spencer and her colleagues for killing off another piece of the Parker Pearson narrative.  Thankfully, there is now hardly any of it left.

=====================






.