Movers and Shakers

I picked up a comment on one of the discussion sites from somebody who argued that archaeologists are no worse than any other academics in their refusal to accept radical new ideas or dissent. Maybe that's true. But archaeology does seem to have strayed into fairytale territory, with a lot of emphasis placed on wacky tales -- not, maybe, about giants and fairies, but about healing springs and massive civil engineering projects involving rafts and rollers. And since the days of Richard Atkinson (a man who liked to form opinion, and who was quite intolerant of opinions he did not agree with) there has been quite a tradition of shooting the messenger when somebody comes along with an inconvenient story. So Geoff Kellaway, Olwen Williams-Thorpe, Stephen Briggs, and Aubrey Burl have all had to put up with vilification -- just because they upset the establishment. I blame the media to some degree for this intolerance and intransigence -- once TV producers get their hands on the likes of Profs Darvill and Wainwright, they encourage them to be as wild and wacky as possible, simply in order to make good television. To hell with the truth, and to hell with good science. And when they say things to camera, with qualifications, I wouldn't mind betting that the qualifications end up on the cutting floor.