Well well, who'd have thought it? I have crossed swords many time with Robert, on a variety of issues, but here we are, on this particular issue, agreeing pretty well on every single point which he raises. His debunking of the Lost Circle TV programme is intelligent, effective and pretty forthright -- take a look here:
Robert and I disagree over how the stones got from Pembrokeshire to Salisbury Plain, since he likes to think of rather a lot of water sloshing around, and I don't -- but there you go, and some agreement is better than nothing. And in focussing on the deficiencies and the petty deceits of the TV programme (a tabloid version of the science documentary) he has done us a service. So thanks, Robert! And by the way, he lives in a deserted cottage by the sea somewhere in West Wales -- so don't bother to try and find him......
I'm not sure whether Robert is familiar with my Waun Mawn article published on Researchgate, here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345177590_Waun_Mawn_and_the_search_for_Proto-_Stonehenge
.... but I hope that he might agree with what it contains. The paper has now been read over 1,700 times, making it the most read of all papers emanating this month from the Durham University Geography Department. I find that quite amusing, since I left the Department in 1977.........
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345177590_Waun_Mawn_and_the_search_for_Proto-_Stonehenge
By the way, some people have complained to me that they have had problems in accessing Researchgate without having an academic account and a registration name and institution. However, I have a PDF of the article, and will happily send it to anybody who asks.
-----------------------
10 comments:
Nice to see Robert is as sharp as ever. It really is remarkable that the archaeological establishment allow MPP, Alice, and the rest of the merry band to get away with it.
It's remarkable, but not surprising. People WANT to believe the nonsense they are propagating -- when you think about it, it's a bit like Brexit. People are incredibly gullible -- and want to have some fantastical story "confirmed" by authority figures like Alice and Mike fed into the "Great Britain" narrative of technical superiority and lost wisdom. It's all a bit weird........ and as I have discovered on Twitter, if you dare to criticise either the messenger or the message, people become enraged!! How DARE you question what lovely Alice and heroic Mike are telling us? After all, they are the experts......
I have been doing what I can to disabuse various people of their misinformed faith in the teller of the tall tales, Master Pied Piper, in various threads on Facebook, since Friday's BBC Waun Mawn programme. There is otherwise an awful lot of naive, trusting blind adherence about.
I'm frequently needing to take folk back to the point in recent modern history when very controversial claims were made for the provenance of specific forms of rhyolite (itself one of the geological types of the catch - all term, 'bluestone') found at Stonehenge to "a few square metres" on the rock surface at Craig Rhosyfelin, EVEN BEFORE Messrs Parker Pearson & Co undertook excavations there and made their extravagant claims that Neolithic quarrying had been confirmed. It is the case that the two geologists Rob Ixer and Richard Bevins had been overly keen to link specific parts of Craig Rhosyfelin with what they had identified in the sub - surface (rather than orthostat samples) at Stonehenge. Following on from those claims, I'm afraid the various excavating leaders for the Stonehenge Riverside Team were probably too keen to "find" signs of ancient quarrying at Rhosyfelin having been seduced by so - called convincing geological analysis of rhyolite samples.
So I see this as the point in recent history when the extravagant series of claims for Waun Mawn began to take root in modern tabloid newspapers and even in academic archaeological departments.
You are right on the timescale. Rhosyfelin was indeed prematurely pronounces as a quarry before the geology work was complete -- I suspect because MPP had been told by assorted mates that the glacial transport of bluestones to Stonehenge was IMPOSSIBLE. That utter conviction, based on duff advice from people who should have know better, has led to the whole mad myth-creating bandwagon that has been rolling ever since.....
Yes, Mike quotes in his "Stonehenge: exploring the greatest..." 2012 book, a Geographer from his then University, Sheffield, who insisted glaciation "never" reached Salisbury Plain, didn't he.
Yes, Chris Clark, James Scourse, Dai Bowen (RIP) and Chris Green have had far too much influence over MPP and his merry gang in telling him that ice cannot possibly have reached anywhere near Salisbury Plain. They are (were) perfectly competent in their own fields, but most of the senior geomorphologists I know disagree with them -- on various occasions I have listed them and their publications. And my senior contacts sure as eggs don't like what they see when they look at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog and are told that they are looking at "bluestone quarries"...........
I've asked the "archaeologyorkney website", as I think you know, Brian, to explain to me WHY Colin Richards and the others completely ruled out glaciation in their detailed excavation interpretations at Rhosyfelin.
I'll guess that if they reply, they will say "Because a senior glaciologist told us it was impossible." (Actually he isn't a glaciologist at all, but never mind.....)
Be interesting to see if I succeed in getting an opinion on my last Comment from the Senior Archaeologist of the Ness of Brodgar dig, who doesn't have to feel he is personally entangled in the Stonehenge/ Preselli claims
Post a Comment