In connection with my last post, I have been looking at the article from Mike Pitts, published in Salon in April. It's very interesting, and is well worth reading. But what I find interesting is his emphasis on dodgy journalism -- with the New Scientist in his firing line.
But it is quite weird that he is all for shooting the messengers, without (apparently) any awareness that archaeologists are the very people who have written these papers that have been misinterpreted or over-interpreted, and that they are the ones who have signed off the press releases issued from their university press offices. Mike Parker Pearson and others have been doing this for years -- using scanty and dodgy evidence to develop wild theories that are then marketed to the media as "spectacular breakthroughs" or "groundbreaking advances." MPP is a master of the method -- when are the archaeologists going to accept their share of the blame for the nonsense that appears in the media?
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Brexit, Brutal Invaders and Stony British Steadfastness
Mike Pitts (Editor)
Salon, 245 (9 April 2019)
Last month two editions of the weekly New Scientist featured stories about British archaeology on the front cover. You might think archaeologists would be pleased, but most of the commentary, some of the more prominent from Fellows, seemed to suggest not. In one of the magazines Timothy Glauser, a law professor dedicated to exposing false medical remedies, says that scientists should ‘speak up, in the news and on social media,’ when they ‘hear somebody using scientific language inaccurately’. Archaeologists have been doing just that – about articles in New Scientist. What’s going on?
Concern about the first story (9 March) was less to do with the science than its headline: ‘The original Brexit’. Richard Webb, Executive Editor, had written about the history of Britain’s physical connection with the continent over the past 800,000 years, and the origins of the English Channel. He describes the comings and goings of early humans across an isthmus. ‘You see a drop in accessibility during warm periods’ (when the sea level was higher), says Nick Ashton FSA. ‘The only times people could get across was when it was cold.’
That connection was eroded by water flowing south from the North Sea, first around 450,000 years ago, in a catastrophic overflow that created huge chalk cliffs between Dover and Calais, and again after 180,000 years ago. Lower sea levels 20,000 years ago exposed a wide land shelf between eastern Britain and Scandinavia, which was, from our perspective today, terminally flooded 8,200 years ago, leaving the UK separated from the continent.
The land shelf was conjured into public consciousness by Bryony Coles FSA in 1998. Hitherto, she argued in a ‘speculative survey’, archaeologists had referred to the land between Britain and the continent as a ‘bridge’. That concealed, she said, the significance of a landscape the size of southern England, rich in resources that would have appealed to hunter-gatherers. So she gave ‘the North Sea Plain’ a proper name, after a sandbank where in 1931 a trawler had brought up a hunter’s harpoon point made 13,500 years ago: Doggerland. Orme drew maps, imagining how Doggerland looked. Since then considerable evidence has accumulated for lost coasts and rivers, thanks especially to seabed surveys by the oil and gas industry exploited by a project led by Vince Gaffney FSA and the late Kenneth Thomson. And now the submerged land has returned to the imagination, featuring in two well-reviewed books. In Time Song: Searching for Doggerland (February), Julia Blackburn discovers Doggerland history (talking to, among others, Nick Ashton, Bryony Orme, Martin Bell FSA, Jim Leary FSA and Dave Field FSA) blending past and present. Doggerland (March) is the title of Ben Smith’s first novel; writing in the Guardian Stuart Evers describes it as a book set in the near future on a North Sea windfarm, with conversations ‘reminiscent of Beckett or perhaps Pinter’.
Roger Cox wrote in the Scotsman that it was ‘impossible to read [Time Song] without Brexit in mind’ (he found the book ‘magical, mesmerising’). It was this link between prehistory and Brexit (New Scientist compared an ancient strip of land between the Netherlands and England as ‘a backstop that prevented Britain’s exit from Europe for the next 150,000 years’) that caught the attention of Kenny Brophy FSA. He had recently written an article, published in the December Antiquity, proposing that ‘any archaeological discovery in Europe can – and probably will – be exploited to argue in support of, or against, Brexit.’ In ‘The Brexit hypothesis and prehistory’ (a title consciously modelled on ‘The invasion hypothesis and prehistory’, by Grahame Clark FSA, Antiquity 1966), Brophy writes that ‘Examples demonstrate how archaeological and ancient DNA [aDNA] studies are appropriated for political ends.’ His thesis is discussed in the same Antiquityby Chiara Bonacchi FSA, Andrew Gardner FSA and Nathan Schlanger. ‘These calls for disciplinary solidarity, advocacy and activism’, concludes Brophy in an afterword, ‘are all the more vital as we await the inevitable post-Brexit Brexit hypothesis mutation, as suggested by Schlanger’s (2018) dystopian vision of Union flags draped from Stonehenge. We will all need to be vigilant.’
Brophy continued the argument in The Conversation (12 February), writing that ‘The [UK’s] feverish Brexit neurosis … has poisoned the well of public discourse. It has even infiltrated narratives about our ancient past.’ As an example, he quoted a Daily Mail headline to a story inspired by an English Heritage press release: ‘Stonehenge exhibition of ancient artefacts reveals how Britain has ALWAYS had a fraught relationship with ‘Europe’’ – ‘offer[ing] legitimacy’, adds Brophy, ‘to the Brexit process as prehistorically the natural state of things.’
In its first feature New Scientist had used Brexit as a hook to promote an informed article. The second feature, felt critics, distorted archaeological understanding. Drawing on recent aDNA research, science writer Colin Barras claims that Stonehenge is ‘a memorial to a vanished people … wiped out by incomers,’ the Yamnaya and their descendants from northern Europe, who might be ‘the most murderous people in history’. Media picked up the theme. ‘The most violent group of people who ever lived,’ headlined Mail Online: ‘Horse-riding Yamnaya tribe who used their huge height and muscular build to brutally murder and invade their way across Europe than 4,000 years ago.’ The Sun ran a similar story, and both quoted the archaeologist who was Barras’s main source: Kristian Kristiansen FSA.
The controversy dates back to 2017, when a large aDNA study went online ahead of peer-review publication in Nature (March 2018). As I wrote in Salon at the time, the paper (among whose many authors were at least 11 Fellows) argued that a substantial immigration into Britain from around 2500 BC was followed by the almost complete replacement of the native genome – reported in the press as ‘Intruders forced out ancient farmers that built famous relics such as Stonehenge.’ A debate followed about the extent to which aDNA and archaeological data were revealing different narratives about the same societies, the dangers of creating sweeping theories that relied on small and possibly unrepresentative samples, and ways of interpreting the evidence that did not involve great migrations (such as the movement of women at marriage).
Nuance was not the first concern of the other New Scientist feature. Supported by dramatic illustrations by Simon Pemberton – perceptively analysed in a blog by Katy Whitaker FSA (5 April) – Barras focuses on the idea that genome change, both on the continent and particularly in Britain, was the outcome of a violent annihilation of an earlier native population. ‘I’ve become increasingly convinced there must have been a kind of genocide,’ Kristiansen tells Barras, perpetrated, explains the science writer, by horse-riding people represented in the ground by ‘Yamnaya-like artefacts and behaviour’. David Reich, a lead geneticist in the research, supports this view, referring to an aDNA study in Iberia where he sees ‘males from outside … displacing local males ... almost completely’. Barras also talks to Volker Heyd, an archaeologist who is sceptical of the violent migrants thesis, and qualifies his conclusions (‘Even if they weren’t the most murderous people in history, there is no doubting that they spread far and wide’). But it was New Scientist that upset some archaeologists.
Tom Booth, a bioarchaeologist at the Natural History Museum, argued on Twitter that there are many other possible readings of the data: ‘my view is that all the ancient DNA can say on its own at the moment is that there were large-scale population shifts across Europe resulting from movements of people carrying ancestry originating in the Pontic steppe … certainly in Britain, there is no evidence for a surge in violence at the beginning of the Beaker period’ (@Boothicus, 31 March).
Rachel Pope FSA (@preshitorian, 5 April) suggested that ‘Not all change is (necessarily) an indication of mass migration of rampaging big-men (and an accompanying genocide/rape). Change can also be about cooperation and love.’ How do we tell? ‘Interpretation based on good data, hard evidence and reason,’ she suggests. ‘Multi-variate, inter-disciplinary research across years. Not an unsupported, too-rapid, pop interpretation of aDNA data, in a publication that really should know better!’
‘Wonder if anyone has bought the film rights for this yet?’ tweeted David McOmish FSA (@DavidSMcOmish, 30 March): ‘The Yamnaya, evil superheroes...’ Kenny Brophy (@urbanprehisto, 29 March) left his copy of New Scientist on the train … unread.
It’s not going to go away yet. In his series Simon Says on National Public Radio (transcribed under the headline, ‘Can Stonehenge Offer A Lesson For Brexit?’, 6 April), Scott Simon says, ‘Something in the standing stone slabs in that ancient ceremonial site seems to signify stony British steadfastness… even when the slabs of Stonehenge were being raised, people understood they were stronger together than apart.’
‘Load of old rubbish,’ tweeted Kenny Brophy.
