May God save us from erratic experts and erratic opinions......
Things are getting dirty out there. The forces of darkness are so determined that the words " glacial erratic" and "Stonehenge" should never be mentioned in the same sentence that they have produced a very strange paper on the Newall Boulder, designed to refute any suggestion that glacier ice may at some stage have approached Salisbury Plain. The paper is written by an interesting collection of bedfellows -- Bevins, Ixer, Pearce, Scourse and Daw -- and it is so filled with dodgy assumptions and speculations that I shall take great pleasure in scrutinising it in more detail in another post. I do not for a moment accept that the paper is authoritative, scientifically sound or correct in its conclusions.
The paper is accompanied by two quite bizarre posts by Tim Daw on his blog site, designed to rubbish a couple of my posts on this blog about the Newall Boulder. No point in complaining -- in one of my posts I had a go at the very strange article published by Ixer, Bevins, Pearce and Dawson in 2022 in "Current Archaeology" and concluded that it was essentially worthless. So I have to accept incoming fire and deal with it as appropriate. Maybe Tim sees himself as the feisty defender of the establishment.......but at least he acknowledges my existence, which is something to be grateful for.
Rob Ixer, Richard Bevins, Nick Pearce, and David Dawson.
CURRENT ARCHAEOLOGY, AUGUST 29, 2022, 5 pp
Victorian gifts: new insights into the Stonehenge bluestones
https://the-past.com/feature/victorian-gifts-new-insights-into-the-stonehenge-bluestones/
The new paper:
Lithological description and provenancing of a collection of bluestones from excavations at Stonehenge by William Hawley in 1924 with implications for the human versus ice transport debate of the monument's bluestone megaliths. Geoarchaeology 2023: 1-15
DOI:10.1002/gea.21971
Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer, Nick Pearce, James Scourse, Tim Daw
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/YUUAUVRWBNTZTPSQVBGM?target=10.1002/gea.21971
(You may find that it is behind a paywall.)
In his blog Tim says: "It might be thought unkind to remind people of the erroneous opinions that have been published on Newall's Boulder now the full scientific analysis is available and any suggestion it is a glacial erratic dismissed. But I think a sample of them should be archived. We should see them as the grit in the oyster, worthless irritants except when they help pearls to be produced.". Stirring stuff indeed -- "erroneous opinions", "worthless irritants" and so forth.
DOI:10.1002/gea.21971
Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer, Nick Pearce, James Scourse, Tim Daw
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/YUUAUVRWBNTZTPSQVBGM?target=10.1002/gea.21971
(You may find that it is behind a paywall.)
In his blog Tim says: "It might be thought unkind to remind people of the erroneous opinions that have been published on Newall's Boulder now the full scientific analysis is available and any suggestion it is a glacial erratic dismissed. But I think a sample of them should be archived. We should see them as the grit in the oyster, worthless irritants except when they help pearls to be produced.". Stirring stuff indeed -- "erroneous opinions", "worthless irritants" and so forth.
I'm sure Tim is trying to be helpful by "archiving" some of my work, but he need not have bothered. The National Library of Wales archives the full blog already, on the grounds that it has immense value as a repository for hard information about Stonehenge and the events and processes of the Ice Age.
And the suggestion that the new paper contains a full scientific analysis and that it is therefore correct is of course bizarre. If every published scientific paper is "correct" then there is no need for science. The mentioned study is a useful scientific analysis, and it will no doubt by followed by others which will question its observations and conclusions.
In a second post Tim goes on at some length about the shape of the Newall boulder, and I do not have a clue what he is tallking about. Then he says that I have interpreted slickenside traces as glacial striations, demonstrating again that he does not understand -- or has not even bothered to read -- the points I have made in previous posts about these features.
With friends like Tim, who needs enemies?
I am away in Sweden at the moment, with no access to my raw materials, but as soon as I get home I will deal with the matter in hand. Watch this space.........
I am away in Sweden at the moment, with no access to my raw materials, but as soon as I get home I will deal with the matter in hand. Watch this space.........
9 comments:
Bevins, Ixer, Pearce, Scourse and Daw.....strange bedfellows indeed. " And they all turned over and one fell out..... ". Almost as thick (intellectually in this case) as thieves! What particularly amuses me is this article's bibliography, talk about as packed as a tin of sardines. And, of course, no mention of, for example. John, B S., Elis-Gruffydd, D., and Downes, J., 2015, 2 peer-reviewed articles by glacial geomorphologists about the so-called "quarries".
The Wiley piece is NOT behind a paywall, folks
Not yet behind a paywall -- but I suspect it nwill be before long. Sometimes they allow free access for a fortnight, and then erect the fuill paywall. Nort sure of the journal policy in this case.
These. guys are certainly not stupid. That's why it's so sad to see their names attached to articles like this one........ and if they had any respect for academic convention and for balanced discussion they would have cited at least three other peer-reviewed (and very inconvenient) papers of mine which are strictly relevant to the discussion about ice limits.
" Maybe Tim Daw sees himself as a feisty defender of the establishment.... " I suspect he wishes his audience to see him as a stalwart accredited MEMBER of said establishment. It's sad that he simply falls hook, line and sinker for what Rob Ixer, himself bloated with hubris, tells him. These 4 authors of the Paper under discussion are fully paid - up members of Mike Parker Pearson's human transportation ruling hypothesis. Very sad that, as so much of what we find in Social Media, this is just another example of a POLARISED OPINION, with no room for any nuanced thought about the subject of glacial transport. No, human beings did it ALL, no argument, Nature had no role and Man is King of all we survey. Rather like Climate Change Deniers.
Not sure what motivates our friend Tim. But on his blog he is still cutting and pasting chunks of my blog, presumably with the intention of making me seem foolish. He clearly thinks that the idea of the Newall boulder being a glacial clast has been permanently disposed of by the "evidence" presented by his scientific friends. And he is still going on about the "bullet shape" of the clast -- I am still completely mystified about what he is trying to say.......
Tim is sadly blinded by the light emanating from his own shiny infallible self - belief. Yet very very few people place Comments onto his own "Sarsen" blog - why is that? Answers on a postcard, please. Meanwhile, Brian's Blog continues to receive hundreds of comments.....
I have tried to post comments on various occasions, but Tim chooses not to publish them. His blog is not really a discussion forum.........
I have endeavoured to advise Tim that Rob Ixer is not a geomorphologist but a geologist and therefore he doesn't possess the expertise that those who study landforms have.
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