Sarsen.org drags the debate into the gutter

With a little help from his friends, Tim Daw (over on Sarsen.org) has decided to drag the debate about bluestone transport into the gutter.  In a series of posts he makes a serious attack on my integrity, concentrating on citations and protocols -- while ignoring the fact that my latest article is carefully considered and respectful to previous authors and publications.  I have tried to respond through comments on his blog, but that is effectively impossible, and one just ends up going round in circles.  So I have to respond here.

In one post he refers to the old article written by Lionel Jackson and myself (in Earth magazine in 2009) as "sensational".  In fact, in 2009 the Earth magazine was a perfectly respectable "popular science" journal, carefully edited, reporting on developments in the earth sciences.  It was certainly no more sensationalist than "Current Archaeology", "British Archaeology" or a number of other popular journals used over and again by Ixer, Bevins and Parker Pearson for the perpetration of their theories to non-specialists.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Here are his headlines:

Bibliographic Negligence in John's 2024 Paper

Misrepresentations and omission in John's 2024 Paper

In his garbled piece on "bibliographic negligence" Tim criticises me for failing to mention the OU work on samples from the boulder in the late 1980's.  I do cite their work and thought I had made it clear that I was referring to examinations of the boulder rather than to the laboratory examinations of geochemistry and petrology.  With reference to text citations, one is constantly making judgements about where to place them; you just cannot overload a paper with multiple citations of the same source.  And then he has the cheek to accuse me of disregarding antecedent research, while simultaneously trying to defend the reputations of the likes of Ixer, Bevins and Parker Pearson who have cynically and deliberately ignored the two 2015 papers written by Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd, John Downes and myself in peer-reviewed journals simply because what we say is extremely inconvenient.  That's almost a decade of selective amnesia and bibliographic negligence.  What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I'm accused of egregiously failing to cite the 2023 paper by Bevins et al.  Because the paper was published in 2023 (and was therefore a late addition to the literature) I had to add it to my article at a relatively late stage in the editing of the manuscript -- but it's petty in the extreme to pretend that it should have been cited here rather than there, or there rather than here.  Life is too short for such nonsense.  The article is cited in several places in the text.  Tim complains that the authors of the 2023 paper made a "complete detailed examination of the boulder".  They did nothing of the sort.  Their examination was superficial and misleading, and missed many key features.

In his piece on "misrepresentations and omission" Tim makes similarly absurd claims.  Referring to my discussion of the idea that Stonehenge was built "where the stones were found", he takes issue with my cited sources.  He claims that the opinion of Judd in 1901 or 1903 was "near worthless."  I happen to disagree;  Judd was an astute observer who made many valuable contributions to the debate and who had a number of impressive insights. As for the views of Field et al, it is disingenuous to quote their conclusions and ignore what went before.  Maybe I could have cited other sources, some involving David Field -- but over and again in a paper of this sort one makes judgments about which of multiple sources one should cite and which one should leave to one side.

Then I am criticised for not citing the paper by Nash et al on sarsen sources. Of course I was fully aware of that paper, which I found interesting but unconvincing.   My paper was about the bluestones, and not about the sarsens.  But to pretend that Nash et al (2020) were infallible ("Nash et al provide evidence that the sarsen stones of Stonehenge were not found where the monument was built") is more than a little foolish.  Nash et al did NOT demonstrate that all or most of the stones were carried from West Woods, and subsequent work (reported faithfully in this blog) by Ixer, Bevins and others across the Atlantic suggests that the sarsens came from multiple sources.  And this work has done nothing to eliminate the possibility of the local use of locally derived stones.

This attack from Tim is all very petty and ill-judged, and does nobody any credit.