The giant stone row that never was.......
What with all the fun and games relating to the "giant pit circle" around Durrington Walls, it's worth reminding ourselves that the man blowing the trumpet and flying the flag is Vince Gaffney, who is clearly on a mission to out-do MPP in the scale and significance of the things he finds. Or claims that he has found. Do you remember the famous case of the "gigantic stone row" which proved simply be be the product of a very fertile imagination and a gullible media?
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2016/08/durrington-red-herrings-and-red-faces.html
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-37047010
Well, here we go again, with the "gigantic pit circle" which has shown up -- so we are told -- on all the wonderful gadgetry used in the latest TV spectacular. Are we really being expected to suspend our disbelief all over again, and to accept what we are being told, just because it's all terribly scientific?
The circle and the pits -- or those that they chose to tell us about......
Artists reconstruction, complete with little Neolithic diggers
Yes, Vince Gaffney has even MORE 'history', vis a vis the Greater Stonehenge Landscape. SEE e.g. 'The Cursus Great Pit', Posted 29/12/11, with its 18, mostly sceptical Comments. Vince is here postulating a Mesolithic origin to goings - on, well before the Great Cursus and Stonehenge. He's a canny lad, or hopes he is.
ReplyDeleteI recommend folk look at Vince Gaffney's Wikipedia entry, particularly career - wise. Well worth a read for me with knowledge of Historical Geography and an interest in landscape archaeology, Vince's field of study. He also worked with Julian Richards n the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by Gaffney -- he seems gloriously unconcerned as to whether he is right or wrong. I suppose there is a lesson for all of us that we should not get too attached to our hypotheses. But in normal science research, hypotheses appear, get tested, and then survive or disappear in the pages of learned journals. The trouble with the modern generation of "megaphone archaeologists" -- or two individuals in particular -- is that they use all the media mechanisms at their disposal to spread their fantastical theories across the world as if they are facts, without ever testing them properly. Bad for science, bad for academia, and ultimately bad for their own reputations.
ReplyDeleteHis younger brother Chris is also an archaeologist and appeared briefly on the 90-minute (with matching sumptuous advert breaks) extravaganza programme.
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