25th Feb: BBC’s Stonehenge – fake news!

The other night (24th Feb) the BBC repeated the programme “Stonehenge: The lost Circle Revealed”.  First broadcast in 2021 their description on iPlayer says “In a world exclusive, Professor Alice Roberts follows a decade-long historical quest to reveal a hidden secret of the famous bluestones of Stonehenge.”  It is a very unsatisfactory programme during which Alice Roberts does a lot of arm pumping to emphasise her words.  She is an intelligent person and I wonder if this is body language trying to say “please do look harder, the emperor really does have clothes”!

Since visiting Stonehenge I’ve been reading about its archaeology and realise that the programme is also out of date and could truly be described as “Fake News”!  The lead archaeologist, Mike Parker Pearson (“MPP”) identifies a very natural looking rock outcrop at Craig Rhos-y-felin as the quarry for the “bluestones” at Stonehenge (MPP et al. 2015).  If that was a bluestone quarry, there are loads of them in North Wales where I once lived!  No evidence is shown, like discarded antler tools, etc., just that MPP says it was a quarry and describes everything with great certainty.

MPP indicates quarried bluestones

For example, the still image shows MPP indicating what he claims to be quarried megaliths which for some reason were rejected.  To me they don’t look much like the bluestones at Stonehenge which I recently saw “close-up”.  The bluestones at Stonehenge are more rounded, although most are believed not to have been worked.  The rocks in the “quarry” look like bits of stone detached by natural winter freezing and thawing prcesses.

The programme goes on to suggest that, at Waun Mawn, they discovered a stone circle where the bluestones were initially erected before the circle was dismantled and the stones were transported to Stonehenge.  The evidence for this hypothesis is: “Radiocarbon and OSL dating of Waun Mawn indicate construction c. 3000 BC, shortly before the initial construction of Stonehenge. The identical diameters of Waun Mawn and the enclosing ditch of Stonehenge, and their orientations on the midsummer solstice sunrise, suggest that at least part of the Waun Mawn circle was brought from west Wales to Salisbury Plain” (MPP et al. 2021, abstract). That sort of logic would definitely not have got past me had I been a referee for their paper!¹

Alice Roberts “eats” hazelnuts

The BBC programme suggests the construction of the Waun Mawn circle fills the gap between some neolithic person eating hazelnuts at Craig Rhos-y-felin (demonstrated by Alice Roberts), and the construction of Stonehenge.  They suggest that one of the holes at Waun Mawn is similar in shape to the lower end of one of the  bluestones at Stonehenge, and that that is conclusive proof. One stone out of forty-odd appears to fit?… if they could match several maybe (although John (2024) demonstrates that the holes are too shallow).   Also,  the “bluestones” at Stonehenge are of varying rock types, so why would the builders of Waun Mawn circle have gone around Pembrokeshire collecting them rather than using MPP’s quarry, which he describes as only a “stone’s throw” away?

But there is no point in ranting on because, based on Bevins et al. (2022), MPP et al. (2022) now admit  “that the stones at Waun Mawn have no geological match to the 43 surviving Bluestones at Stonehenge, it may be that none of Waun Mawn’s stones ever reached the Wessex monument“.

There is more detailed discussion of Waun Mawn in John (2024) and the writer has described the much more plausible thesis that the bluestones reached Salisbury Plain through glacial action in an ice age (John, 2018).

The iPlayer description (in 2024) says that the MPP team’s “revelations will rewrite the history of Stonehenge forever“, but their conclusions did not last until 2022, one year after the programme was first broadcast.  So why is the BBC still publishing it as archaeological fact in February 2025?  Presumably too much was invested in making the programme to allow it to be discarded.

The problem is that neither the original programme, or its description on the iPlayer site, allow for possible doubt in the conclusions.  Recent repeats of old BBC programmes have reminded me how much better many science programmes on the BBC once were.

References

Bevins, R.E., N.J.G. Pearce, M. Parker Pearson & R.A. Ixer. 2022. Identification of the source of dolerites used at the Waun Mawn stone circle in the Mynydd Preseli, west Wales and its implications for the proposed link with Stonehenge. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 45: 103556.

John, B. 2018. The Stonehenge Bluestones, Greencroft Books, 256pp.

John, B. 2024. The Stonehenge bluestones did not come from Waun Mawn in West Wales. The Holocene, online 20 March 2024, 15 pp.

MPP and 13 others, 2015. Craig Rhos-y-felin: a Welsh bluestone megalith quarry for Stonehenge. Antiquity  89 (348), 1331 – 1352.

MPP and 12 others, 2021. The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales. Antiquity 95 (379), 85 – 103.

MPP and 14 others, 2022. How Waun Mawn stone circle was designed and built, and when the Bluestones arrived at Stonehenge a response to Darvill. Antiquity 96 (390), 1530-1537.

¹ (25th March) I’ve since found that there is much dubious logic in the publications about Stonehenge.  One problem might well be the use of TV channels to help fund digs.   I would have hated having any of my science funded that way.  What would happen if we messed everything up, like sinking the instrument package, or the weather didn’t cooperate?  They are not going to want a programme which says we spent all this money and discovered nothing!  But of course, lots of real science is just like that.