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Friday 14 September 2018

Does "Current Archaeology" actually read the articles that it reports upon?



On many occasions on this blog I have bewailed the declining standards of journalism across not just the British press but also in the pages of popular specialist magazines like British Archaeology and Current Archaeology.   Journalists and editors seem to be increasingly gullible and increasingly careless -- and one has to wonder whether they scrutinize anything any longer.  I had a go at the Smithsonian for its nonsense article on the strontium isotope ratios of cremated individuals at Stonehenge.  (That was based on the press release linked to the Nature article by Snoeck et al.)
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/08/now-smithsonian-goes-completely-bonkers.html 

The latest piece of slapdash reporting is in the latest issue of CA.   I have been looking at the article on P 9 of CA343.

The article contains the following statements:

“Three (of the analysed individuals) had isotope ratios that were so dissimilar to the Stonehenge area that they are unlikely to have obtained any of their diet from the region. Instead, their isotope values point to older lithologies more in keeping with parts of Devon and Wales, particularly western Wales. The other seven had isotope values in between the two, possibly reflecting a diet that came from both west wales and Wessex……….. These results lend further credence to the idea that during the Neolithic there was a strong connection between west Wales and Salisbury Plain, which included the movement of both materials and people.”

This is of course a travesty.  It seems to me that whoever wrote this piece has not actually read the full paper, and has simply extracted material from that infamous and highly misleading press release.

Crucial evidence is contained within Figure 2 of the published paper and in the detailed text.  The isotope values of the 3 individuals in question could have been obtained in any part of the map coloured yellow, or indeed from any part of the map coloured orange, if the individuals involved had moved about within areas with both higher and lower strontium isotope signatures. To flag up west Wales as a likely home area for these people is to make a giant speculative leap which is simply not supported by the evidence.

It is also highly misleading to speculate that people with intermediate values might have spent some time in west Wales and some time in Wessex. Those individuals could have come from anywhere in Great Britain, if they moved about; and indeed we already know that they did move about, since they ended up at Stonehenge!  This has already been pointed out by many who have read the paper, which has of course not been very well received.

As I have argued before, the paper by Snoeck et al introduces a powerful interpretive bias by giving a “geographical assignment” for one of the sampled individuals (288) to the area around Craig Rhosyfelin. There is no logical reason for this, and indeed almost anywhere in Lower Palaeozoic Britain could have been chosen instead. The analysis of “West Wales wood" used for the cremation pyre could have been done in any densely wooded area off the chalk, and the same rather absurd result would have been obtained — namely that "there is a strong statistical probability that the sampled individual MIGHT have come from the location tested.” This, I am sad to say, is the worst sort of pseudo science.

The editor plans to publish “a more in-depth account of this exciting new research” in the next issue of CA.  I have written to her with a polite request that she might ensure that the writer sticks to the facts and leaves out the wholly unreliable speculations about West Wales..........

Any bets on what the article will actually say?

1 comment:

TonyH said...

Let's hope "British Archaeology" journal and editor Mike Pitts do actually read the articles THEY report on - I await my subscription copy arriving. One or both magazine may have my subscription cancelled. Very disappointing.