Pentre Ifan

Just for fun -- and as a reminder that we do have some rather good megalithic monuments in Pembrokeshire, here's an old water colour of mine, dating from 1996.  "Pentre Ifan, Early Morning."  It used to hang on the wall of the Eco House in Newport -- I discovered it in a filing cabinet when we were clearing out the office the other day.....

More rock pinnacles: Ronde Spires and Tarnet Peak

 

 

I was looking up some Antarctic information and came across these incredible photos -- from the mountains about 150 km from Queen Elisabeth Base in Antarctica.  They show how pinnacles and even teetering spires can be created through a combination of glacial downcutting and frost shattering on exposed rock surfaces.  You can only get these sorts of features where there is efficient glacial transport to take away the accumulating scree which would otherwise soon build up on the flanks of an isolated rock pinnacle and eventually obliterate it -- and protect what is left in the "core".

The top photo shows the Ronde Spires, and the bottom two show Tarnet Peak from two different directions.

The Rhosyfelin Myth Machine

I went to a talk last night given by Phil Bennett, the Archaeological Heritage Manager for the Pembs Coast National Park.  It was on the preservation of heritage sites within the National Park, and while I was quite happy with most of what he said, he was seriously astray when it came to talking about Rhosyfelin.   I like and respect Phil, and have known him for many years (he has had responsibility for the Castell Henllys "Iron Age Village" for a long time now, and has done a fine job there) but he and I have argued about things before, and probably will again in the future.......

I wrote to Phil today about his talk, and thought it worth sharing my letter.  I do this on the basis that when any one of us stands in front of an audience, and holds forth on something which we know something about, we have a duty to be accurate and balanced in what we say.  We should also be prepared to defend EVERYTHING which we put forward as established fact or as "consensus scientific opinion".  I think that Phil has been seriously misled, and I have to admit to getting very irritated when people like him, with gravitas and authority, are used to mislead and misinform -- and to perpetrate the myth that Rhosyfelin is indubitably a Neolithic Quarry.

By and large, people who sit in audiences in public lectures are ill-informed and gullible, and tend to believe or accept what "authority figures" tell them.  They also love a good story, and of course they are for the most part predisposed to believe tales of heroic feats performed by our distant ancestors.  That is why the "human transport" theory has survived for so long, and why it has become a "national myth."  Everybody knows it, and audiences feel affronted when somebody like me stands up in front of them and tells them that it has no factual basis to it at all........  In such circumstances charlatans and opportunists thrive by giving people what they want in exchange for their £3 entrance ticket, and fantasy is dressed up as science, and hardly anybody notices what is happening.  People seem to leave their brains at home when they go out for the evening.  Probably they want entertainment, not enlightenment..........  As Tony has just reminded us, the Piltdown Hoax is not so far away.

Every time somebody like Phil stands up and gives a talk, and repeats the bits of comfortable misinformation they have heard from the Rhosyfelin digging team, the myth is reinforced. As I have said before, story telling, public relations and marketing appear to have entirely replaced the scientific method.  And is the archaeological establishment (if there is such a thing) fast asleep in its open grave, waiting to die, while all of this is going on?

The letter:

Dear Phil

Thank you very much for your talk to PTA last night.  It was a pity it was curtailed by those technical glitsches -- I was similarly afflicted when I spoke to the PTA about Rhosyfelin etc in a quite different venue, over a year ago.  The Rhosyfelin goblins at work again........

I enjoyed most of what you said, and would like to have raised a number of issues with you if you had stayed a bit longer!  So I'll do it now.  My points relate to Rhosyfelin.

1.  You are really rather careless in referring to the site with 100% confidence as a Neolithic Quarry.  If I may say so, that's not good practice for an experienced archaeologist -- because no matter what MPP may say about his discoveries, what he seems to have discovered is a camp site used over a long period of time, with a pile of broken scree in the vicinity.  I have seen NO convincing evidence that this is a Neolithic quarry site, let alone one that has something to do with Stonehenge, and at the very least you should reflect this uncertainty and ongoing debate in what you say to uninformed (and often very gullible) audiences.......

2.  You said that two of the standing stones at Stonehenge had been provenanced back to Rhosyfelin by the geological detective work of Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer.  NOT TRUE.    None of the Stonehenge orthostats has been traced to Rhosyfelin.  What the two geologists have done is trace some of the rhyolite debris in the Stonehenge Layer to localities in and around Craig Rhosyfelin.

3.  You referred to the big "orthostat"  as being self-evidently quarried because of the position in which it is lying.  NOT TRUE.   It is not aligned parallel with the rock face, and it is simply a large stone that has fallen from the face just like all the others above it, beside it and below it.

4.  You mentioned the fact that the orthostat had been broken and had therefore been abandoned by the quarrymen. That's an unsupportable speculation -- ALL of the stones that have come from the rock face and from the crags above it are broken, to a greater or lesser degree!  You could probably put many of them back together again if you were determined enough...........  There's nothing unusual about the big one.

5.  You referred to the big stone as being supported or underpinned by other stones, deliberately placed there by the quarrymen. That again is an unsupported assertion.  As far as I can see, the stones beneath the big "orthostat" are lying in perfectly natural -- almost random -- positions, exactly where they fell.  They appear prominent today because the archaeologists have taken away all the debris surrounding them -- in other words, what we see now is an "archaeological artifice."

6.  You referred to the scratches or striations on that stone near the lower end of the "orthostat" -- and asserted that they were not natural, but were caused by big stones being dragged across them.  NOT TRUE.  Those apparent "striations" are in my view nothing more complicated or significant than outcropping foliations,  just like the ones we see on the surfaces of many other stones in the bank of scree and rock debris.  Those "striations" run in all sorts of different directions, right round the compass, as you would expect in a jumble of fallen rocks.

I could go on, but will resist.  I know you mean well, and that you have picked up on most of the things you have said directly from MPP and the other archaeologists involved in this dig, but it really does nobody any good when mythology is perpetrated in this way.  I appreciate that you are trying to encourage people to take an interest in archaeology and to value Pembrokeshire's rich heritage, and that's entirely laudable -- but when myth is turned into "fact" with the willing assistance of you and many other professionals, it does a profound disservice to archaeology -- which comes over as being unscientific and driven by fantasies and ruling hypotheses.    Archaeology should be accessible and popular, but it should also be truthful -- and it should accord due respect to the views of people from other disciplines including glacial geomorphology.  What is going on at Rhosyfelin is much too incestuous for anybody's comfort.......  I get the impression that everybody who turns up there has come to worship at the shrine, and not to ask hard questions.

http://forum.pembrokeshireu3a.org.uk/index.php?topic=1413.0

So please, when you have your sold-out big archaeology day in November, will you please encourage MPP to be rather more nuanced in his presentation than he has been in the past, and to allow for a degree of uncertainty in this business of the "Neolithic Quarry"?

All good wishes

Brian

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More on ropes

 Ropes found near the Red Sea -- reputed to be the oldest ropes ever found -- around 2,000 BC.

Some time ago I did a piece on ropes, and I have been thinking more about this.  The archaeologists want 80 or so bluestones to be moved from West Wales to Stonehenge -- and MPP now wants them to be moved not by sea but overland.  He suggests that the 80 or so stones, each weighing between 2 tonnes and 4 tonnes, would have been moved entirely by pivots and levers -- which is stretching fantasy to absurd lengths, if you will forgive the pun.  Maybe he has realized that "long rope" technology at the time was completely inadequate for the task of strapping big stones onto sledges or frames, or for pulling large stones across difficult terrain?

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rope-technology.html

In the little research that I have done, it seems that there was some knowledge of ropes back into the Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic,  but the ropemakers of the time would probably have used wild vines, brambles or nettles for the task, and to make ropes long enough and strong enought to shift a 4 tonne monolith would, I think, have been far beyond the capabilities of those early people.  Some authorities say that the art of making long and thick ropes (ie involving some sort of mechanical process for twisting the strands) started in China around 2800 BC and gradually spread into Europe and eventually into Britain.  On this schedule, the technology would not have been available at the time the archaeologists want big stones to have been moved from Wales to Stonehenge.

This seems to me to be an insurmountable technical hurdle.........

Lecture on December 3rd 2013

Advance warning -- on December 3rd I've been asked to give a talk in Moylgrove Village Hall on the subject "Stonehenge, Pembrokeshire and the Ice Age."  Time: 7.30 pm.  If you ask me nicely, I might even be prepared to spend a little time talking about Rhosyfelin.

However, I shall follow the philosophy of this blog -- that is, to test all hypotheses to destruction.  So I shall NOT simply dismiss the quarry hypothesis out of hand, and I'll try to present the evidence and then seek to find the most rational scientific explanations for what we see. 

Everybody welcome (I think the Village Hall committee might charge £3 for entry) -- and a good vigorous debate would be marvellous..........

Slapdash journalism from Earth Heritage

I came across this article in the magazine called "Earth Heritage" -- available online as a PDF, here:

http://www.earthheritage.org.uk/

It's a very attractive magazine, supported by Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage, GeoConservation UK and the GA -- so it has a good scientific pedigree, although it is intended for a general readership -- or a readership of people interested in geology and geomorphology.

There is a nice article by Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins in it, about Rhosyfelin.  But who on earth dreamed up the heading?  Not the authors, I hope.......... since it is a classic example of hype replacing scientific accuracy.

Let's put the record straight.  The "new science" has not pinpointed the source of "THE" bluestones -- just in case there is anybody out there who still thinks that all 43 of them came from the same place.  It has not even pinpointed the source of a single bluestone, let alone 43.  What it has done is locate the area from which SOME of the rhyolitic debitage in SOME PARTS of the superficial material in SOME PARTS of the Stonehenge landscape has apparently come.  A very different matter.

Is that all clear?  Well, that's all right then........

Celebrity Status for Rhosyfelin

I was at a talk last night -- of which more anon -- at which a photo was shown of Welsh Culture Minister John Griffiths being given the lowdown by MPP during a recent visit to the dig site.  Richard Bevins was in attendance, and one of the top people from the UK archaeology hierarchy was also present -- don't recall his name.  No matter.  I wonder how many other "celebrities" have been given the standard guided tour of the site in recent weeks?

One or two people on this blog have expressed the view that the members of the digging are not very good at marketing, and that they are but simple archaeologists getting on with their work.  I beg to differ.  You don't have high-profile visits like that of the Minister without some pretty effective marketing going on -- designed to demonstrate that Rhosyfelin is an iconic Welsh archaeological site of international importance.  That tunes in precisely with the MPP view that this is the best preserved Neolithic quarry in Europe -- soon, no doubt, to be featured in  a spectacular National Geographic film.  Before we know what's happening, we will find that Cadw is listing Rhosyfelin as an Historic Monument -- I wouldn't mind betting that this designation is already in the pipeline, with a citation packed with confidence and hype, and allowing no room for doubt...........

So the myth that this is a quarry site is peddled and repeated over and again, in all the right places, within the political, cultural and scientific establishment, until the fantasy becomes fact.   To hell with uncertainty and scientific rigour.  Should we laugh or cry?  I'm not sure........

I asked in an earlier post about the restraining voices from geologists and other earth scientists.  I ask again -- where are they?  Remarkably silent -- apart from one regular contributor to this blog.  Maybe all the others are keeping quiet because they too are enjoying the ride on the bandwaggon, for reasons best known to themselves?  I'm sorry if this all sounds rather churlish --  but the bottom line here is scientific integrity.  I have thrown down the gauntlet with my piece published on Scribd and with many entries on this blog.  If anybody out there has got anything to say in response, let's hear you!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/150104599/A-Long-History-of-Rhosyfelin

And I'm not going to accept any criticism from anybody who says that the Scribd piece is not peer reviewed, and is therefore not worthy of respect.  It has had a great deal more peer review, from the bloodthirsty readers of this blog (!) than the chapter dealing with Rhosyfelin (Ch 17) in MPP's recent book, in which he described Rhosyfelin as the "Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries".