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:
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.
Peculiar situation with Tim's blog. I am unable to leave any comment. He is being combatitce without addressing the substance,
ReplyDeleteLooking at his substack, he actually leads on glacial transport. He attacks the idea by demanding any stone found at SH should have clear marks indicating Glaciers otherwise the idea can be dismissed.
It seems that the cult members are agitated by Brian's paper and have exploded beyond rational and respectful debate. I am disappointed In Tim..
I have often tried to comment on Tim's blog, and have always failed. I think the comment facility has been deliberately disabled. So much for discourse and dialogue..........
ReplyDeleteAs a retired Chartered Librarian and Honours Geography graduate as well as being a regular commentator on Brian's Blog Posts and a person with an abiding enthusiasm for prehistoric archaeology, I am in a position to be able to say confidently I concur with Brian's methodology in constructing his Paper's bibliography.
ReplyDeleteLike Chris, I am disappointed with Tim.
Tim? I have a very strong suspicion that he was not the one who wrote those blog posts........
ReplyDeleteMessrs Ixer & Bevins and often various additional authors have had their many pontifications on the geological analysis of the
ReplyDelete" bluestones" given priority of positioning at the front in the Wiltshire Archaeology Magazine for many, many years. My personal opinion is that this has given the authors a sense of inflated pride - hubris. I get, down here in Wiltshire as a WANHS Member, the impression that these writers have the inside knowledge about "the holy of holy's" secrets as far as the inherent varied geologies of the bluestones goes. We must NOT, whatever we do, dispute the rightful prominence of their articles ( after all, the Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine [WAM] IS called TRILITHON......
What do you think of Daw's Sarsen.org Post dated 17th June, "The Collapse of the Glacial Transport theory". In it, he quotes Powers (1953) and his six- category scale.
ReplyDeleteI mention this because Simon Banton, that other Stonehenge visitor volunteer whose photos of all the Stonehenge Bluestones you acknowledge in your 2 books, said in a spat with me on June 19th, that your Paper was "quite comprehensively refuted" by Daw's Post "by the simple act of comparing it to other in - situ monoliths(!) at Craig hos y Felin.
Daw's latest post? It's complete nonsense. I have better things to do than getting dragged into an endless "debate" with somebody who so evidently knows nothing about glacial geomorphology and who clearly has no wish to learn.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's clearly a complete BLACK HOLE and VACUUM amongst so many who would be our all - knowing gurus on all things "Stonehenge Bluestones", when it comes to proper comprehension of HOW glacial geomorphology properly and thoroughly explains the transportation of erratic boulders!!
ReplyDelete