How the Stonehenge obsession destroys sound science

Open moorland up on the mountain -- at Bedd yr Afanc

I have been having another read of the article Dr Daisy Spencer and others on palynology and environmental change in Holocene Preseli, and am saddened by the manner in which an otherwise sound and quite important piece of work by competent scientists has been destroyed by its obsessive and quite irrational obsession with Stonehenge and the bluestones.........

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

Dr Daisy Spencer’s 2-year post-doctoral research Fellowship at the University of Galway was probably funded to the tune of at least 90,000 Euros.  It had the title: ’Palynology and land use in Preseli: Investigating the origin of the Stonehenge bluestones and population migration’.   So right from the start the research was framed as a part of MPP's grand project and Preseli was framed as a sort of annexe of Stonehenge.  Timeline — project announcement August 2022. Completion August 2024. Publication 2025 by a group including MPP.

According to the info on the University of Galway web site, pollen work was to be undertaken by Daisy and her co-workers "close to the important Neolithic bluestone site of Waun Mawn stone circle and the quarries at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin".  When I read that I had that familiar sinking feeling....... here comes the familiar ruling hypothesis........

Three sites where hot disputes are blissfully ignored by the authors of this article

"It was hoped", said the blurb,  "that results would help to shed light as to whether there was a decline in population around 3000 BC in this area, resulting from a migration out of west Wales, with people travelling with the Bluestones to form the first stage of Stonehenge."   So there was a clear objective, dictated by MPP -- which was I suppose inevitable given that he must have been involved in the grant funding application for the fellowship and the lab and research costs that are considerable with palynological studies and radiocarbon dating.

As I read through the text, I found myself swinging from one extreme to the other.  One minute, admiration for the professional expertise of the researchers, and then frustration at yet another gratuitous mention of bluestones, Stonehenge, lost circles and quarries in places where clean and straightforward science was all that was needed.  I don't recall a single instance where the authors referred to "suggested", "proposed" or "postulated" features; the pretence was maintained throughout that these features are definitively proved to have existed.  The authors were -- or so they pretend --  completely oblivious to the fact that there are serious and fundamental disputes in the literature. Needless to say, there are no citations of "inconvenient" articles in the peer-reviewed literature.  Naivety?  Arrogance? Complacency? How did the journal's peer review process fail to pick up on this?

I gave up on counting these strange and quite unnecessary mentions (and their associated citations)  in the end, and decided that if the researchers did not have the strength of character to resist the abundant textual insertions by a certain well known professor, there was no great point in taking their work seriously.  Such a pity.

OK -- they disproved the hypothesis, but they could, and should, have challenged the very foundations of that absurdly fragile edifice.