re the Altar Stone paper. On the welter of comments about the Altar Stone paper currently flooding social media, one in particular caught my eye. Somebody noticed that according to the "Nature" scale of publication fees, this article probably cost £9,000 to get into print. It still had to go through the peer review process, of course, but the authors were greatly blessed by having that sort of money available to them. So what was the full cost of the research? It was helped, of course, by the fact that the lead author, Anthony Clarke, was a research student working on his doctorate thesis at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, but after looking at zircon dating costs and ancillary costs, I suspect that a budget close to £50,000 is in the right ball park.
If I am not too far out in that speculation, I find it even more astonishing that the authors did not take any proper samples, either from the Altar Stone or from the Orcadian Basin. That would have removed a huge element of uncertainty at one fell sweep, and it would have also countered some of the scepticism about the results which we are now seeing on all sides.
It doesn't really wash for anybody to say that Anthony was a long way off, in Australia, at the critical time. He clearly found the time and the money to come to the UK for all those media appearances at Stonehenge in the last week or two, so he probably could have managed a sampling trip or two had his supervisors insisted on it.
6 comments:
Another issue is the credulity of the mass media. There must be many millions who still believe the key message of the BBC2 2021 documentary (still available) as established fact. Should the BBC issue a retraction? See letter in 22/08 Western Mail.
Hello Anon -- please use your name on any future comments. I didn't see a letter in the Western Mail -- it's a rag that I try and stay well clear of!! Do you have a copy of the letter? re the BBC, I have complained about that infamous TV docudrama, along with others -- but all our complaints have been dismissed out of hand. I have also written to the BBC's disinformation team -- no response so far. I bet the response will be ""It's only entertainment! It isn't necessarily supposed to be true!"
Sorry, I misunderstood the comment options. That's interesting, thank you. I’m merely an interested layman. However, having recently watched the programme again I am even more astonished that the short-lived hypothesis was presented in the way it was - as established truth, a history re-writing discovery. The credulity of Alice Roberts and others is somewhat embarrassing. Given this and the world-wide dissemination of the programme's 'second-hand monument' claim I feel there is a good case to be made for the BBC to set the record straight.
I have often used the same description of the WM! Anyway, it published an article that had previously appeared in The Conversation, but with a different title:
https://theconversation.com/stonehenges-giant-altar-stone-came-all-the-way-from-north-east-scotland-heres-how-we-worked-out-this-astonishing-new-finding-236630
I wrote this in response:
Setting the record straight on the stones
In their interesting article Professors Nicholas Pearce and Richard Bevins and Dr Rob Ixer explain how they concluded through X-ray fluorescence analysis that Stonehenge’s Altar Stone originated in north-east Scotland (‘Solving the mystery over the Altar Stone at Stonehenge’, August 19). They refer also to ongoing work refining the sources of the smaller bluestones to individual crags on the northern Preseli hills.
In February 2021, amidst a blaze of publicity, Professor Alice Roberts presented a fascinating BBC Two documentary, 'Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed', revealing 'an astonishing discovery' which was claimed would ‘rewrite the history of Stonehenge forever’. The programme presented seemingly conclusive evidence published by Professor Mike Parker Pearson and his team, including Bevins and Ixer, that the smaller bluestones had been part of an earlier stone circle on Waun Mawn. One of the stones was even a near perfect match for a hole on Waun Mawn.
However, only eighteen months later the same authors published an article which said ‘On the balance of probability, few, if any, of the stones taken from Waun Mawn ended up at Stonehenge’. This was in light of the findings of X-ray fluorescence analysis reported on by Bevins, Pearce, Ixer and Parker Pearson. This must have been monumentally disappointing to all concerned.
I may well have missed it, but I am not aware that the BBC has also retracted the main message of the documentary, which is still available on iPlayer. If so, it would not appear to have had much publicity. In the interests of credibility and reliability should broadcasters issue a proportionate correction when scientific content is subject to a major revision?
Thanks Gareth for that interesting contribution. The "Lost Circle" proponents pretend that they changed their minds because of their own brilliant research, and that this is all about science correcting itself. They like to pretend that they are the only people capable of doing work of any value on the "lost circle" and the "quarries" of West Wales. That's nonsense -- for over a decade now, some of us have been pointing out that their "evidence" does not withstand scrutiny. They have chosen to ignore us, not even citing our published work. Now they have had to bow to the inevitable, with a great deal of mud on their faces.
Thank you Brian. Having explored your wonderful blog further I see that you made all the points I made and much more effectively 2 years ago!
However there is clearly a great need for much wider dissemination of all the flaws in the documentary. I hope Jacky Henderson’s excellent YouTube video will help with that, along with your Linkedin post.
It’s certainly looking more encouraging by your figures and I can understand why your faith in humanity has become restored!
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