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
https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741
https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741
Since our old friend MPP scatters hypotheses just as others might scatter confetti, it's difficult to know what he actually thinks about anything. But I have been reflecting on the fact that the paper by Daisy Spencer et al (including MPP) has received no media attention whatsoever -- so we can assume that there was not even a press release from UCL........ I wonder why?
I wrote to Daisy Spencer about the article and its weird obsession with Stonehenge, but have received no reply. I wonder why?
In the present circumstances it's difficult to know whether we are supposed to accept that there was a mass stone-carrying exodus from Pembrokeshire around 5,000 years ago. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe we are supposed to think there was a mass exodus, which does not show up in the environmental change records because a few human beings were left behind, tasked with obliterating all traces of quarrying and stone transport, and carrying on as before? Or maybe the stone-carrying expeditions were conducted by an elite and mysterious group that was in possession of secret knowledge of igneous petrology and stratigraphy?
I haven't given much coverage to this idea, mainly because it is so proposterous. But we can see some of MPP's thinking on a corporate, elite management or specialized lineage-driven transport model in his chapter in the edited volume "Trade Before Civilization: New Perspectives on Long-Distance Trade and Social Complexity" (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and in his highly selective arguments in "The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity."
With nowhere else to go, MPP is now forced to drift back toward a variation of the old "elite coercion" or "religious pilgrimage" theories, where a specialized group of elite prehistoric managers (who were of course in possession of esoteric or secret knowledge) somehow convinced a simple and settled West Wales population to let them strip their landscape of their sacred monuments and drag them 140 miles away over land, leaving the local farmers behind to tend the fields.
We will hear more about this as more and more pieces of the edifice collapse. But isn't it rather entertaining that MPP is now homing in on druids and Neolithic bards, having spent much of his academic life assuring us all that Stonehenge has nothing whatsoever to do with the druids? All this just at a time when we are having fun with the Welsh National Eisteddfod, the Gorsedd of Bards, and a Gorsedd Circle made of glass fibre imitation stones? And not so long ago, at the time of the summer solstice, the druids all had a whale of a time prancing around at the old stone ruin on Salisbuiry Plain. Iolo Morgannwg must be chortling away as he looks down from his place in heaven.
More on this shortly..........
==============================
My recent post on the paper by Spencer et al:
A reminder of what I said in 2019:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2019/04/was-there-neolithic-mass-exodus-from.html
So what evidence might there be for a large-scale cultural upheaval in West Wales roughly in the period 5,500- 4,500 BP -- the crucial thousand years in the Stonehenge story? So far as I can see, none at all. True, there are signs of a decline in the construction and use of megalithic tombs (cromlechs or dolmens) for collective burials, and signs of an increase in the setting up of standing stones, either singly or in "settings". And Pembrokeshire does not seem to have been affected by the trend of building large and impressive passage graves like Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey and Newgrange in Ireland; but in considering this difference Darvill and Wainwright, in their big 2016 chapter in "Pembrokeshire County History", say that Pembrokeshire was by no means isolated, but simply part of a quite different network of connected politics in which an emphasis as placed on individual graves sometimes covered with round cairns of stone. In their chapter it is difficult to extract hard facts from a context in which Stonehenge always lurks in the background, with circular reasoning much in evidence -- but suffice to say that there is no suggestion, anywhere, of a major hiatus that must have accompanied a "folk exodus" of people carrying stones or petrified ancestors to Stonehenge.
In contrast, there are many signs of continuity, with the adoption and abandonment of different traditions of building things and burying the dead. One tradition that appears to have been neither adopted, used or abandoned is the tradition of erecting large standing stone circles -- which maybe explains why MPP and his merry band have been hunting fruitlessly for "Proto-Stonehenge" for the last eight or nine years. Another tradition that never was developed, used, or abandoned, was the tradition of quarrying large monoliths from the living rock in designated quarries. And yet another assumed tradition for which we have no evidence at all was the tradition of transporting large monoliths across country for great distances.
So, as far as I can see, there is no evidence to support the hypothesis of a major exodus or series of expeditions eastwards from Pembrokeshire towards Stonehenge for the purpose of political unification or for any other reason. On the contrary, the evidence suggests a fairly small and relatively isolated community developing some local trends, copying or adapting others, and maintaining trading links with other communities in all compass directions. The idea that there was a sort of Neolithic "El Dorado" or Holy Land in West Wales is entirely fanciful; megalithic remains are no more spectacular or abundant here than they are everywhere else. If there was a threat from the east at any stage, involving immigrants from the near continent, it would have been strange indeed for local people to have moved TOWARDS the source of the threat, carrying with them assorted symbols of their cultural identity in the form of more than 80 very large stones.