WAUN MAWN AND THE STONEHENGE BLUESTONES
The publication last month (Feb 2021) of Mike Parker-Pearson's conclusions from his recent work in Western Wales has sparked off a sometimes heated debate among archaeologists and Henge fundis, leaving everyone else puzzled by media assertions that Stonehenge was moved in its entirety from Wales to Wiltshire. It is important to realise at the start that this whole discussion is about the bluestones which some of us (not all of us, yet) believe were used in the first phase of Stonehenge about 2950 BC. There are, of course, the hard-line believers that the bluestones were moved to Wiltshire by glacial action, despite the absence of other Welsh erratics surviving anywhere on the route.
Then there are those who maintain that there is no hard evidence for bluestones at Stonehenge until the digging of the Q & R Holes shortly before 2500 BC. They do have a point, although the circumstantial evidence for an earlier arrival is increasing with every new piece of research. But then much of that research is coming from Parker-Pearson and his allies, and they have been accused of inflating the reliability of the evidence to support his theories, so that it is hard, even with all the data, to make any confident conclusion. And since these are still preliminary results, we are a long way from having all the data to hand.
Let's suppose that Parker-Pearson (and several others before him) is broadly correct, and that the bluestones came to Stonehenge at the beginning of the henge-building (see "The Bluestone Controversy" elsewhere in this blog). He went to Pembrokeshire in Wales seeking evidence that the stones could have been quarried that early. Initially, analysis showed three outcrops in Preseli that matched a number of the stones from Stonehenge, and digs were carried out at these. No one ever said all the stones came from these three sites; indeed, it was clear from the start that some of the bluestones did not come from the Preseli hills at all, and several other probable locations have been identified during the research.
The results from these excavations were controversial. Some argued that the evidence for active prehistoric quarrying at the sites was at best uncertain, and that the samples used for dating could not be directly linked to the mining activity proposed by the archaeologists. Critics have maintained that the lack of certain proof shows that Parker-Pearson's hypothesis is wrong. But an hypothesis remains valid (and potentially true) unless disproven, and the analysis of the rock sources stands in support of MPP's idea.
The dates, when they came, surprised everyone. If accepted as relevant, they showed that at least two of the outcrops were being mined centuries before the first henge on Salisbury Plain. And that posed another question: What were they quarried for and where they had been in the time until they were taken to Stonehenge? Parker-Pearson and others (including me) began to wonder if they were used in a circle or circles in West Wales before being moved to Wiltshire. That could mean that the significance of the stones came from the monuments they were part of, not from some innate property of the rocks in the outcrops themselves. Of course, if the dates did not date the quarries, and were the result of some other activity (herding stock on the hills for example) then the anomaly disappears and the next step in the research does not follow logically - unless it gives independent support to the dating of the quarries.
Which is exactly what happened, more or less. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, the team started digging at Waun Mawn, the least likely of their initial choices of sites for early monuments. Despite a paucity of charcoal in secure contexts, Parker-Pearson has constructed a palimpsest of dates from different techniques that he says shows that Waun Mawn was originally a circle constructed about 3400 - 3200BC and demolished around 3000BC. Needless to say, his critics have attacked his interpretation of the dates and dismissed his conclusion.
Furthermore, the four remaining stones at the site are of unspotted dolerite, a material represented in only three surviving stones at Stonehenge. If these are representative of the other stones at Waun Mawn, it would be very unlikely that all the missing stones went to Stonehenge. But there is no reason to suppose that all the stones in the original circle were the same: in fact it is probable that they were a mix of the various igneous rocks available at Preseli at the time, in which case the problem disappears. And there was one further piece of evidence for a direct link between the two circles. The digital refitting of Stonehenge bluestone 61 (one of the three unspotted dolerite pillars left at the site) into the pentagonal socket in stone-hole 91 at Waun Mawn was very persuasive: if the fit is as close as the reconstruction suggests, it would be a huge coincidence if there were no direct connection.
But we still don't know what the other missing stones at Waun Mawn looked like, nor the nature of the many bluestones now missing from Stonehenge, and sadly it seems as if this conundrum is unlikely ever to be resolved. Has Mike Parker-Pearson's lucky streak held, and do the controversial and sometimes tenuous threads of his argument give enough support to keep his synopsis valid, or has he built a fragile house of cards that will tumble when his critics finally see all the data? For the present, there is no way of knowing: you pays your money and you takes your choice.
