Megaliths and post-modernism: the case of Wales

Andrew Fleming
Andrew Fleming takes phenomenology by the horns. Keywords: Wales, landscape archaeology, megalithic monuments, phenomenology, postmodernism Our work here is open . . . to new interpretations . . . since anyone can visit these stones and experience these places themselves, make new observations and check old ones. (Tilley 2004: 219) Eleven years ago, Christopher Tilley published A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments (1994). It has become a much-cited book. Tilley took the archaeology of landscape in a new direction, presenting a mode of eld observation designed to explore his ethnographically based, persuasive characterisation of Neolithic sacred geography. He presented three case studies, two of which concerned the megalithic chamber tombs of south-west and south-east Wales. He suggested that signicant numbers of these monuments were designed to refer to prominent hills, rock outcrops and watercourses, thus apparently offering evidence-based insights into Neolithic cosmological perceptions. Five years later, I argued that Tilleys ndings could not be regarded as sustainable contributions to Welsh Neolithic studies (Fleming 1999). More recently, in Places of Special Virtue (2004), written with Alasdair Whittle, Vicki Cummings has adopted Tilleys approach with equally problematic consequences. I feel that I must now expound my critique at greater length. I will deal mostly with south-west Wales, and will use the abbreviation TC to refer to the TilleyCummings approach where appropriate, abbreviating Cummings and Whittle to CW.

South-west Wales
In south-west Wales, the TC approach mainly involves claiming that megalithic tombs deliberately referenced rock outcrops located at various distances; a signicant outcrop may have been immediately beside a tomb, a few hundred metres away, or on the summit of a distant hill. Occasionally links are claimed with springs or water courses. TC also discuss relationships between tombs and the sea. Cummings considers 33 sites in total, comprising a minimum of 40 monuments.

Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Wales, Lampeter, Ceredigion SA48 7ED, UK (Email: a.eming@lamp.ac.uk)

Received: 20 January 2005; Accepted: 11 July 2005; Revised: 9 August 2005 antiquity 79 (2005): 921932

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In cases where tombs are immediately adjacent to rock outcrops (24 per cent of the total, or 8 sites out of 33; Cummings & Whittle 2004: 29), it is hard to deny some kind of deliberate association. Whether this has to do with Neolithic cosmological beliefs is another issue; I will deal with these tombs later. In the case of linkages with more distant outcrops, however and much of the TC thesis is based on these the arguments are lacking in rigour. For reasons mostly to do with the tombs state of preservation, the positions of entrances or the directions which the tombs faced are frequently unclear. So TC cannot work with indicated alignments or directions. But instead of regarding this as a good reason for using better quality data, in another research area, they have chosen instead to argue that a rocky outcrop or hill may be signicantly associated with a tomb if it is simply visible from the site (although signicance is also claimed when a target is invisible from a site, as in the case of the outcrop to the west-north-west of Carreg Samson; pace both Tilley 1994: 99 and Cummings & Whittle 2004: 56). At Garn Turne (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 148), the invisibility of the Preselis is claimed to be deliberately contrived. TC have chosen to do their eldwork in an area where the location of many tombs on hillsides (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 37, 87) virtually guarantees wide vistas of striking hills, rock outcrops and sometimes dramatic coastlines. It comes as no surprise that rock outcrops may be seen on the skyline from 12 sites, that is 36 per cent of them, or that 61 per cent of the sites, 20 in total, have a view of outcrops (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 88). (But 13 tombs out of the 33 are not related to outcrops at all; 2004: 29.) Tilley writes for the most part as if it is unnecessary to demonstrate that the claimed associations with distant outcrops are more than coincidental, whilst Cummings makes little more than gestures in this direction. As we shall see, TCs selections of the phenomena they think signicant on any particular site often seem arbitrary and sometimes overambitious, and the link between ethnographically derived insights and demonstrable patterning in the eld is never successfully made.

Standards of eldwork
I nd it impossible to square some of Cummings eld observations with my own. Looking out from what was probably the portal at Llech y Dribedd, one faces the fairly prominent if distant outline of Frenni Fawr, a distinctive outlier of the Preselis; it is some 13km from the site. Yet despite apparently being a rare case of an indicated target, Frenni Fawr is omitted from both horizon diagram and descriptive text (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 139). The tomb at Colston is claimed to be close to the start of the Western Cleddau (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 147). However, the source of the Western Cleddau lies some 14 kilometres away. Llech y Dribedd is said to be in a similar location to its neighbour, Trelyffaint; yet the former is visibly in a local roof of the world situation, well back from the southern edge of a small coastal plateau, whilst the latter is on a gently sloping hillside. Colston and Garn Turne are said to be in similar landscape settings (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 147); yet the latter is on a local eminence offering panoramic views in most directions, whilst the former is on a relatively steep north-facing slope. Cerrig Llwydion is said to be on the summit of a domed hill (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 171), but in fact the crown of the hill is c . 100m to the south-east.
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It is not clear what rules govern the inclusion of features on Cummings diagrams. The tomb at Ffyst Samson presents perhaps the most target-rich view of all the sites in Pembrokeshire. Yet its visibility diagram (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 155) does not include the island of North Bishop (c . 24km distant) despite Cummings regard for the potential signicance of islands (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 35). Nor does the Ffyst Samson panorama indicate Poll Carn, a spectacular rock pillar which stands out on the distant horizon some 11.5km to the south-south-east. The panorama for Carn Gilfach (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 153) omits the islands of North Bishop and Carreg Rhoson, which are nearly 27km distant; more disconcertingly, given the view from the site, it also disregards the prominent rocky outcrop on Carn Gelli, less than 2km away. At Carreg Samson, Cummings diagram includes the outcrop some 400m to the west-north-west, although this cannot actually be seen from the monument. Coetan Arthur is said to be placed up against a rocky outcrop, although it is actually on a saddle between two outcrops; the sea is said to be distant when it is barely 200m from the tomb (whilst at White House an outcrop described as nearby is 1km away). Coetan Arthur is said to be difcult to nd . . . only approached from Whitesands Bay or Carn Llidi is the characteristic propped stone visible (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 162). But these are virtually the only approaches, given that Coetan Arthur is on the rock-girt promontory of St Davids Head. Cummings nds the landscape setting of St Elvis unspectacular and is ambivalent about the factors which may have inuenced the tombs siting (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 160); unaccountably she fails to mention the spring just below it, quite possibly once the site of a holy well and in any case evidently the focus of a probable early Christian site and also the medieval church of St Teilo (Ludlow 2003).

Standards of argument
Cummings frequently uses the word seems in relation to monumentlandscape relationships, and she mentions numerous potential targets without further advocacy of them. Thus by including the possibles as well as the probables (from her standpoint), the evidence for these relationships is made to seem quite voluminous. In fact, the evidence for long-distance relationships with rock outcrops is effectively non-existent. The megaliths are mostly in three kinds of situation. A few are on hilltop sites, on local (but not regionally striking) eminences, slightly removed from the very highest spots, which may be occupied by rock outcrops. A larger number of tombs are beside outcrops, on the coast or further inland. Rather more are located at various points on hillsides mostly on fairly gentle slopes, a few on rather steeper terrain. Although Cummings likes to suggest or imply (notably in Cummings et al. 2002) that the simultaneous presence at most tombs of open and restricted views was by design, hillside siting usually secures this result in any case, as CW effectively admit (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 37, 65). Pace Cummings (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 37), the fact that tombs which are not located on hillsides tend to avoid maximum visibility need not imply intentionality. It is hard to achieve 360 long-range panoramas, since many local hills of medium altitude have broad, rather at tops and/or rock outcrops which impede part of the view as at Ffyst Samson. It is hard to see why Tilley concludes (1994: 94) that tombs
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apparently not sited for maximum visibility were meant to be approached only from certain directions. TC have made use of highly contentious lines of argument. One concerns the relationship between tombs and the sea: 54 per cent of the sites are within 1km of the sea, and 72 per cent have a view of it (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 33). Carreg Samson, it seems, may have been focused on the local harbour and/or a large nearby sea-cave (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 156). Otherwise, the tombs are seen variously as (a) built to command wide sea views, or to reference the sea (e.g. Coetan Arthur, Carn Wnda, Carn Llidi; Cummings & Whittle 2004: 33, 82), (b) ignoring or unconcerned with it (e.g. St Elvis and Llech y Dribedd; Tilley 1994, 93; Cummings & Whittle 2004: 139) or (c) carefully positioned to have a glimpse or restricted view of the sea (e.g. White House and Treffynnon; Cummings & Whittle 2004: 33). As well as implying disconcertingly diverse Neolithic approaches to the cosmos within a small region, this catholic approach, of course, allows phenomenologists to say something apparently meaningful about any coastal site. Cummings treatment of Carreg Samson illustrates her contention that, on a few sites, the coincidence of several possible sighting factors, rather than illustrating the archaeologists dilemma, actually lends greater weight to her advocacy of Neolithic intentionality. Here Cummings implies that the builders, wanting to refer to the harbour and/or the cave, also cleverly managed to nd a site on a line between two rock outcrops (one of them admittedly out of sight from the tomb) and saw signicance in the fact that they were re-using a Mesolithic site. The entrance passage (which has a known length of only 2m and is evidenced by three stone holes revealed by an excavation) was allegedly aligned on both outcrops (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 29, 83). But neither alignment would be visible or obvious to anyone moving along it in either direction one because it cannot be seen from the site in any case, and the other because it would be obscured by the bulk of the monument. The CW view of Pentre Ifan (see below) involves a comparable argument. Why is Carreg Samson an instance of careful orchestration (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 29) rather than coincidence, and why are such multiple target cases not noted more frequently? Another case of orchestration is claimed for Garn Turne, where the monument is said (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 148) to have been placed very precisely and tted into the landscape so that all of [the] landscape features are either visible or invisible (!) But a site visit strongly suggests that this massive, heavy capstone has been moved precisely nowhere. The tomb constructors have managed to lever it up at one end, but that is as far as it goes; how can one believe in the precise choice of location in these circumstances? It is much more likely that the stone was venerated in situ before eventually being levered into something like its present position. Following Tilley (1994: 105), Cummings claims that a particular locational choice must be deliberate because, if the monument had been located n metres away (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 20), its supposed target would not have been visible. But exactly the same thing might be said of any other features of the local landscape from which outcrops can be seen farmhouses, football pitches, road signs, trees, grazing cows, etc. These phenomena have clearly not been put into the landscape to reference distant rocks! Tilley (1994: 96, 99, Figure 3.14) and then Cummings (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 37) claim that at places like Carn Gilfach and Morfa Bychan, outcrops immediately above
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the sites draw attention to the monuments location. Having approached Carn Gilfach on a beautiful sunny day, I can only comment only if one already knows its there. A Neolithic outsider, arriving from a distance, would have had difculty in spotting the tomb (especially in woody terrain or on a gloomy day). And the idea of outcrops keying in monuments or drawing attention to them would be rather problematic at sites like Garn Gilfach, where the area is covered with natural features which resemble monuments (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 153). At Carn Llidi, only observers in the restricted area of St Davids Head would be in a position to have their attention drawn to the position of tombs below the outcrop. If this was such an important general idea, why do so many outcrops, including the most spectacular ones, have no megalithic chamber tombs built anywhere near them, whilst conversely a not very prominent outcrop, such as Carn Wen, may spawn three or more tombs? According to Tilley (1994: 96, 99) the rock outcrops simultaneously make the monuments visible and invisible (but not literally, since the tombs cannot be seen). But this appeal to an anthropologically grounded prehistoric taste for ambivalence is essentially argument by mystication. In rough country, one either knows where a tomb is to be found, having been told that it is beside a certain outcrop, or one does not. Tilley (1994: 94-6) argues that the four monuments on the shelf below a linear rock outcrop at Morfa Bychan would have made sense in terms of bodily movement from south to north, with the tombs getting progressively closer to the outcrop; the northernmost site, D, is actually built close to the rock face, symbolically facilitating entry to the parent rock or implying integration with it. But the situation is not straightforward. As Tilleys own sketch shows (1994: Figure 3.10), the shelf is much narrower in the vicinity of Morfa Bychan C; on this spacing, monument C had to be closer to the outcrop than A and B were, irrespective of its builders choreographic tastes. And Site A is rather obviously beside its own quarry a clear, seemingly unambiguous break in the face of the outcrop to the west; the same effect is visible at site B, but here only the top layer of rock seems to have been removed. At Morfa Bychan it seems that regular spacing of tombs in the cemetery is in evidence but not a choreographed sequence. No similar entering the rock sequence has been proposed for the comparable cemetery at Carn Wen. Cummings and Whittle, effectively following Tilley (1994: 94), suggest that Carn Ingli was a highly signicant and symbolic hill (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 82). Only ve local tombs are available to document this proposition; of these, Cerrig y Gof is too morphologically aberrant to be included here. Of the others, Llech y Dribedd and Trelyffaint are 5.5km from Carn Ingli. Pentre Ifan is about 3.6km away, and Carreg Coetan is 2km distant. These monuments were hardly built around [Carn Inglis] base (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 82) Three of them have portals (although at Carreg Coetan, the excavator failed to nd evidence for the missing portal upright; Rees 1992: 15-6). As mentioned above, the Llech y Dribedd portal points not at Carn Ingli but rather at Frenni Fawr. Carreg Coetan faces an unassuming distant hillside. And Pentre Ifan faces uphill, towards what Cummings would normally describe as the restricted visibility zone. Yet here she develops an unwonted interest in the view of the Preseli Hills as seen from the forecourt. They are unimpressive, but can indeed be glimpsed beyond the slightly domed near horizon. Cummings implies that their phenomenological signicance may be that they start to come into view when an observer, walking uphill, reaches the tail of the long cairn. However, if
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Lynch and Barkers suggestion (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 143) is correct, and the fully developed cairn is a late addition to the monument, this would probably not be relevant to the choice of location for the site. It may be more signicant that Pentre Ifan stands on a deliberately dug hollow (Grimes 1949: 13-14, Figures 3 and 4), partially lled by the stones of the forecourt blocking. If this hollow was the borrow pit for the capstone, as Hogg originally suggested an idea which CW apparently like (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 73) the location may not have been chosen for its relationship to distant hills at all. I accept Cummings argument (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 69-72) that the blocking of sight-lines by vegetation is not necessarily a problem for megalithic phenomenology, given the deciduous nature of almost all British trees. However, this notion is harder to sustain for uphill views like the one under consideration here. If there was woodland to the south of Pentre Ifan, the observer looking uphill, out of the forecourt, would see the massed trunks of the trees, not the view through their upper branches, and the distant hills would be obscured in any season. The charcoal from Pentre Ifan was almost entirely of gorse (admittedly of the smaller variety; Hyde in Grimes 1949). If the skyline seen from the Pentre Ifan forecourt was dominated by gorse, which is common around here (and it is not deciduous), the Preselis would have been virtually invisible. In fact, other considerations probably governed the choice of this location. As already noted, a suitable capstone, half below ground, may well have been present here. Construction of the cairn was certainly preceded by the digging of pits A and B, and probably by the erection of stone IX (Grimes 1949: 15, 17) a possibility which Cummings and Whittle are certainly prepared to countenance (2004: 73). These features may have been intended to anticipate the monument as eventually completed; but it is just as likely that the latter was built here because the site was already signicant. Tilley (1994: 105) suggested that the incline of capstone and long cairn duplicate the outline of Carn Ingli. But this is the only comparison of this direct kind which has been made in the region (unless one counts the evidently contagious practice of photographing Llech y Dribedd from the north [without comment] so that a resemblance between the tip of its capstone and the distant summit of Carn Ingli seems apparent; e.g. Tilley 1994: Figure 3.20; Children & Nash 1997: 54; Cummings & Whittle 2004: Figure 4.7). We should remember that virtually by denition, portal dolmen capstones are usually tilted, and long cairns tend to slope from large end to smaller end. At Pentre Ifan there is no demonstrable homology with Carn Ingli, since the builders have not gone out of their way to create anything unusual. The fact that several possibilities have been put forward for the phenomenological signicance of this site does not strengthen the argument. If that were so, one would be stunned by the ingenuity of those who constructed the monument at Ffyst Samson, which might refer to one or all of the following features: the island of North Bishop (at c . 24km); Carn Llidi/St Davids Head (c . 18-20km); the bay and beach (where the ancestors landed?) at Aber Mawr (2.5km); the several rock outcrops south of Strumble Head (c . 4km); the nearby outcrop, from which the monuments stones were almost certainly derived (c . 50m); and Poll Carn, 11.5km to the south which, as already mentioned, does not feature on Cummings diagram despite its prominence on the distant skyline; by contrast, for the Garn Turne tomb, Penberry and Carn Llidi are deemed signicant
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features, despite being 21 and 25km distant respectively (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 148). Poll Carn is one of the most striking outcrops in Pembrokeshire. From some angles it looks like the local answer to Le Pinnacle in Jersey (Bradley 1993: 27); one could easily imagine it being a sacred rock, a place of pilgrimage in prehistory. But only two nearby monuments might be said to refer to it Garn Turne and Parc y Llyn, which lie at a distance of 3-4km. From Parc y Llyn, Poll Carn looks striking (if distant), but it is also at the edge of the zone of distant views; the monument would have had a much better prospect of the Great Treffgarne Mountain outcrops, including Poll Carn, if its builders had put it some 300m to the south-west. As Cummings photograph shows (Cummings & Whittle 2004: Figure 4.5), to obtain the distant view of the Carn Poll and Maiden Castle outcrops, observers are expected to look not outwards from the forecourt, as at Pentre Ifan, but in the opposite direction, from the outer part of the forecourt, some 8m from the tombs entrance, over the top of the monument and its capstone a procedure not suggested for any other site. Is it not rather more likely that the builders of Garn Turne focused rather on the nearby rock outcrops to the north-east, which stand imposingly in front of the forecourt? It is easy to make assertions about phenomenological signicance if one works in an area where sites are elevated enough to see a multiplicity of targets at all sorts of distances, uses monuments which rarely have indicated sightlines, and is prepared to believe that individual designers essentially did their own thing. Thus, sometimes they focused on nearby rocks, sometimes they were interested in very distant outcrops. Viewing targets of signicance might involve looking outwards from a forecourt (Pentre Ifan), looking inwards from a forecourt (Garn Turne), looking out of a passage towards an outcrop not actually visible (Carreg Samson), turning right after leaving a forecourt (Pentre Ifan) or a passage (Carreg Samson) or looking out from a putative original entrance at the side of a chamber (Tilleys suggestion for Pentre Ifan; 1994: 105). Occasionally, megaliths are claimed to have been located in relation to watercourses, although the position of the tomb at Mountain might as easily relate to a pass through the hills as mark the source of the Eastern Cleddau, as Cummings claims (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 34). If those who chose the locations of tombs did make highly idiosyncratic choices, the resultant heterogeneous pattern would probably make it impossible to do any serious work on these questions, or to develop archaeological arguments beyond speculative assertion. However, as CW point out, there are morphological similarities between many of the tombs of south-west Wales. Furthermore, the limited number of types of chosen location implies a good measure of regional agreement on appropriate settings for megalithic monuments. This existing degree of patterning might well make one question the sort of heterogeneity, not to say incoherence, accepted by Tilley and Cummings in respect of targeted features which, it must be repeated, are almost never directly indicated by the monuments themselves. There is, then, virtually no evidence for the targeting of distant outcrops by megalithic tomb builders in south-west Wales. On Cummings gures (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 29), after setting aside the 39 per cent of sites not related to outcrops, and the 36 per cent which allegedly relate to rocky outcrops on the skyline, one is left with 24 per cent of the sites 8 out of 33 which are positioned right up against outcrops. What of these tombs? I do not particularly want to dissuade prehistorians from believing that prominent rocks
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close to megalithic tombs may have been regarded as the abodes of supernatural powers. But there are other ways of interpreting the patterns observed. Some megalith builders may actually have chosen to construct their sites very close to stone sources and quarries. It is obvious, for instance, that the capstone of the monument at Garn Gilfach was quarried from the outcrop immediately above the site; the Carn Llidi monuments are clearly very close to their stone sources. It is the more morphologically correct tombs, identiable as monuments within the portal dolmen tradition, which tend to be found away from outcrops (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 37-9). There may be something to be said for going back to Glyn Daniels sub-megalithic designation (1950: 46-51) for monuments built beside outcrops, such as Carn Wnda or Carn Wen, to underline that such tombs may well be late and/or the creations of people who cannot or will not construct tombs of mainstream type. (Daniel argued that such tombs incorporated up to four makeshift labour-saving devices.) Cummings and Whittle put forward the rather persuasive idea that the point about the capstones, especially those primarily inuenced by the portal dolmen tradition, was their size and weight and the achievement of making a very large stone oat in the sky (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 72-6). Such a need to nd and use massive stones must have constrained locational choice to some degree. It may well have determined the location of those monuments built close to outcrops. This consideration affects the model favoured by Cummings and Whittle, who suggest that in general the Neolithic settlement zone was probably below the typical hillside megalith (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 28). In a few cases, they note that if a tomb had been positioned any further down a hillslope, a view of target x would have been impossible (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 29). (One would be more impressed with this kind of argument if one did not suspect that had the tomb been placed lower down, it would have been said to make a point of avoiding a view of the feature in question.) The implication is that such a tomb was built just high enough to see its target, presumably by people living lower down, who did not wish to move stones any further than necessary. However, this bottom up view may be questioned. The majority of potential capstones are most likely to have been found relatively high on the slopes; if they were to be moved anywhere, it would have been sensible to drag them downhill especially the more massive ones. If our usual models of vegetation history in the British uplands have any validity, woodland which would have been a nuisance for Neolithic stone haulers even if not a problem for phenomenologists might reasonably be expected to be thinner on the upper slopes, perhaps to the point of non-existence in places, making stone haulage easier. Thus the constructors are more likely to have had a top down approach. It was a relatively straightforward matter to build a tomb with an impressive capstone on fairly high ground with good views; it would be surprising if Neolithic people took the trouble to drag a heavy stone downhill merely in order to stop at the point where their target was about to disappear from sight. And given the considerable weight of some of the stones chosen (and perhaps the supernatural signicance attached to the locations in which they were originally found?), one wonders how much locational exibility the tomb builders really had. Is it reasonable to assume, with Tilley (1994: 105), that the builders of Llech y Dribedd were intentionally shunning the coast? Or did they simply build at the place where they found its massive capstone, perhaps already venerated, like the Milking Stone on St Kilda (Fleming 2001: Figure 3)?
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The Black Mountains

Tilley suggested that around the Black Mountains, in south-east Wales, the lower-lying long cairns are oriented roughly parallel to the courses of rivers, whilst those located on spurs and foothills tend to point to the prominent hills on the skyline (1994: 122, 124). Cummings concedes that the monuments are rather variably positioned in relation to rivers and river valleys (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 64) and thus apparently shares my scepticism about the rst component of Tilleys argument. As to the second, she also admits that the long cairns do not actually point directly at the targets nominated by Tilley (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 61) and publishes a photograph of Pen y Wyrlod (Talgarth) which illustrates this (2004: Figure 6.3). But then she not only moves the goalposts but massively expands the goalmouth, arguing that it was actually the escarpment edges which were signicant. However, none of her three photographs (Cummings & Whittle 2004: Figures 6.2-6.4) illustrates anything more than general views of distant hills. And Cummings suggestions in relation to Pen y Wyrlod (Talgarth) which may be followed on her Figure 6.3 are ambivalent. The cairn is said to point to one side of the mountain (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 61), and to be aligned on the edge of Mynydd Troed (2004: caption to Figure 6.3). At the same time, what Cummings calls the fac ade of the long cairn (it is actually a horned forecourt) seems to be aligned on the gap between . . . Y Grib and Mynydd Troed (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 196). A gap between hills is also suggested as the target for the rst phase of Ty Isaf (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 61). The target offered by the escarpment is rather hard to miss. The north-west edge of the Black Mountains, which is relevant for most of the monuments (see Tilley 1994: Figure 4. 7) is about 17km long (from Cusop Hill/Cefn Hill to Mynydd Llangorse). But despite the breadth of the target, Cummings puts forward tortuous arguments in support of the mountain edge hypothesis. At Pipton, she claims that the large asymmetrical chamber changes its axis a number of times, yet each time the axis changes it is pointing towards the edge of the escarpment (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 61). Cummings uses this as the starting point of a claim that, in the case of probable or possible multi-phase sites such as Ty Isaf and Pipton, the signicant landscape features may have changed over time and be marked in the changing alignments of the chambers. Thus we are asked to believe that these Neolithic communities revered the edge of a group of mountains in general, and at the same time attached signicance to various parts of that edge sometimes more prominent hills, sometimes gaps between them, sometimes the middle of the escarpment (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 61, in relation to the lateral chambers at Ty Isaf ) and that they changed the signicance of these more detailed targets within the sort of time-span usually envisaged for the completion of a multi-phase long cairn, and at Pipton, apparently, in the period required to complete one chamber! Surely the whole point of sacred mountains is that however complex, elusive and fragmentary the myths become, their signicance endures their physical identity not being a matter for confusion. Allegedly the pointing rough as it is now claimed to be was done sometimes by the axis of a long cairn, sometimes by lateral chambers and occasionally by a central chamber. Another odd argument is the claim that the right-angled turn in the passage at Arthurs Stone also effectively represents a change of plan in both senses: those leaving the chamber, instead of facing the restricted
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view, encountered the edge of the Black Mountains (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 67). (On other sites, facing the restricted view was perfectly acceptable.) And if they wished to face Hay Bluff, what was to stop the Arthurs Stone builders designing a straight passage? As in south-west Wales, the more complex the claims made for a site, the more ones credulity is strained.

In conclusion
Of course, prehistorians are free to believe in Neolithic ritual specialists noted for the idiosyncracies and heterogeneity of their locational and architectural decision making within small (and no doubt quite endogamous) neighbourhoods people who were incapable of reaching much agreement about cosmologically signicant targets and changed their minds over short (sometimes very short) periods of time, and who were capable of both architectural perversity and careful orchestration (as at Ffostyll; Cummings & Whittle 2004: 62). Such a vision might make sense of the claims and suggestions made by Tilley and Cummings. After all, human life and thought are usually untidy. But has this Neolithic incoherence been revealed, or is it a by-product of the investigators wishful thinking? It is not my intention to question the idea that prehistoric people sought the supernatural in the landscape; Richard Bradley, starting from European archaeological evidence rather than the ethnography of distant parts of the planet, has already made progress in this eld of enquiry, for example in An Archaeology of Natural Places (2000). It would be surprising if Neolithic concepts of the cosmos were not deeply rooted in landscape. Nor is this article intended as a proxy for a general attack on phenomenological approaches in archaeology; I started this investigation mostly because I found it difcult to look students in the eye, keep a straight face, and explain, on site, how the ideas of Tilley (and now Cummings) are supposed to work. What has gone wrong in the case of southern Welsh megaliths is akin to what went wrong with the ley line theory put forward by Alfred Watkins in the 1920s (Watkins 1925; Williamson & Bellamy 1983) and the claims made by Alexander Thom about the geometry and mensuration applied to the construction of British stone circles, and their astronomical alignments (Thom 1967; Burl 1976: 50-2). Watkins and Thom, working in positivist frameworks, documented their views in considerable detail. But the rules of argument which they set up were simply not rigorous enough to satisfy archaeologists normal requirements for the validation of claims for patterns and relationships in archaeological data. Eventually, Watkins and Thom were vulnerable to archaeological common sense; credulity was strained by the notion that prehistoric people travelled in straight lines, or employed, over a considerable area, a unit of measurement standardised with tolerances best expressed by citing the thickness of a wasps leg. Archaeological eldwork has been well served over the years by a combination of empiricism, logical positivism and critical scepticism, supported by careful observation and recording. It comes as something of a shock to encounter a version of landscape archaeology (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 17, 22) which is much more dependent on rhetoric, speculation, argument by assertion, and observations not always replicable when checked. It is perhaps just possible to persuade oneself that Tilleys 1994 studies were intended
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mostly as an experimental, pioneer demonstration, rather than a defensible contribution to Neolithic studies; but the same can hardly be said of Cummings work, which is presented as normal science, following Tilleys paradigm. In any event, the study of ceremonial monuments has been virtually taken back to pre-Enlightenment times; for one has to ask, in what sense does this kind of phenomenology represent a conceptual advance on the approach of William Stukeley? And on what basis, if any, would phenomenologists part company from a writer like Peterson (1998: 25-32 and passim), who claims that the stones at Pentre Ifan (seen from the east) represent a whale/seal being carried aloft by three seal/whale orthostats and that a great many seal head designs can be seen in the proles and surface relief of several stones on this site, not to mention numerous other well-known British and Irish megaliths? What has gone wrong in a wider sense? A short answer to this question seems to be that Tilley, and then Cummings and Whittle, have transferred the style of writing and argument used for post-modern critique and interpretive writing a highly performative area to a project which is essentially and necessarily investigative. The practice of eldwork has been treated as a continuation of rhetoric by other means. With reference to his most recent phenomenological essays, Tilley has claimed that a thin and sensorily impoverished analytical account has been replaced by a richly textured carnal phenomenological thick description (2004: 28). Apparently the thin technicist archaeological description, which he eschews, makes the past remote and sterile (Tilley 2004: 221). Ironically, however, sterility is an all too evident outcome of these Welsh case studies; in my judgement, virtually nothing new has been revealed or discovered in the areas targeted by phenomenology, and fresh interpretive insights are largely conned to ethnographically based rhetoric. Nor is thick description particularly evident here, although I accept that contextualising these megalithic tombs is not particularly easy, given the range of evidence available for the Welsh Neolithic. (Arguably Breton menhirs are even more challenging in this regard; Tilley 2004: Chapter 2.) Tilley has characterised writing the past in the present as a conceptual dreamwork (2004: 225). This may be so. But eld archaeology is nothing like dreamwork; it is simply unrealistic to problematise it in terms of a simple polarisation between an approach dubbed analytical, Cartesian and sterile, and a polemically constructed alternative which claims to be experiential, thickly descriptive and human. Stones that oat to the sky (Cummings & Whittle 2004: 72-6) are one thing; landscape archaeology that oats to the sky is quite another. Acknowledgements
I thank colleagues in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Wales, Lampeter, for illuminating comments on a seminar which covered some of the ground with which this article is concerned.

References
Bradley, R. 1993. Altering the Earth. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 2000. An archaeology of natural places. London: Routledge.

Burl, A. 1976. The stone circles of the British Isles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Children, G. & G. Nash. 1997. Neolithic sites of Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire. Woonton Almeley: Logaston.

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Cummings, V. & A. Whittle. 2004. Places of special virtue: megaliths in the Neolithic landscapes of Wales. Oxford: Oxbow. Cummings, V., A. Jones & A. Watson. 2002. Divided places: phenomenology and asymmetry in the monuments of the Black Mountains, Southeast Wales. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12: 59-70. Daniel, G.E. 1950. The prehistoric chamber tombs of England and Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fleming, A. 1999. Phenomenology and the megaliths of Wales: a dreaming too far? Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18: 119-25. 2001. Dangerous islands: fate, faith and cosmology. Landscapes 2: 4-21. Grimes, W. 1949. Pentre Ifan burial chamber, Pembrokeshire. Archaeologia Cambrensis 100: 3-23. Ludlow, N. 2003. The Cadw early medieval ecclesiastical sites project part 2, eldwork: Pembrokeshire. Ms. report by Cambria Archaeology for Cadw. Peterson, E. 1998. Stone Age Alpha. Aberuthven: P. C. D. Ruthven. Rees, S. 1992. A guide to ancient and historic Wales: Dyfed. London: HMSO. Thom, A. 1967. Megalithic sites in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon. Tilley, C. 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments. Oxford: Berg. 2004. The materiality of stone. Oxford: Berg. Watkins, A. 1925. The old straight track. London: Methuen. Williamson, T. & L. Bellamy. 1983. Ley-lines in question. Tadworth: Worlds Work.

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