PODCAST #41 | Waun Mawn & Stonehenge

The Prehistory Guys

12th feb 2021 BBc broadcast a programme hosted by Professor Alice Roberts called 'Stonehenge, the Lost Circle Revealed'.

Both leading up to and afterwards, there was a flurry of headlines in the press ranging from the reasonably restrained to the outright sensational. To cut to the chase, the end result has been - to the dismay of many in the archaeological community and both Rupert and I - the the perception has been left with the general public that Stonehenge had a previous existence in the south Wales hills before it was transported wholesale to what is now Wiltshire.

We followed up that broadcast with a short off-the-cuff show of our own on YouTube that attempted to redress some of the (what we regarded as) misleading elements of that programme.

In some eyes, this was interpreted as an attack on the lead archaeologist featured in the BBC show, namely Prof Mike Parker Pearson. It was not. What MPP has done here is amazing and we hope by the time we’ve got to the end of this section in the podcast, you’ll get a sense of the high regard we’ve got for him.

What we were trying to do however is point out that there was so much more nuance to the finds that have been made and the results that have been extracted. Moreover that there are other voices in the field that were ignored by the BBC and that all is not as simple as made out.

All that said - the story is amazing, the questions it poses are mind bending and the picture of people in the late Neolithic and what they were up to remains just as enigmatic if not more so than before the gloss of certainty that was painted over this whole question of the origins of the bluestones of Stonehenge by the BBC programme.

We just want to make it real again. Strip it back to the actual evidence and leave you - we hope - much more excited by just how much more complex this story is than the impression left by the BBC in this case.

As ever - even with the detail we go into here - we've barely scratched the surface. This could have been a very long podcast indeed. However, let us know if you think we should do more on this!

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