Isn't it interesting that with regard to the latest "discovery" that the Altar Stone could not have come from Orkney (Bevins et al, 30 August), there has not been any media coverage whatsoever? No banner headlines, no TV news reports, no specially commissioned YouTube videos, no radio news items.........
We can also assume, therefore that there has been no press release accompanying the publication of the article. Why not, I wonder?
The other extraordinary thing is the speed of publication. Received 23 July 2024, accepted 22 August 2024, available online 30 August 2024. Barely a month passed between the submission of the article and its publication online. That means that there cannot possibly have been any peer review. If there had been, it would have been acknowledged at the end of the paper.
So it was a hastily produced correction to the rather forceful suggestion (not a direct claim) that Orkney was the probable source of the Altar Stone in the "Nature" paper by Clarke et al, published just a couple of weeks earlier.
What a shambles.......
Next time UCL lend their name to a discovery it may not be taken seriously.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the UCL Institute of Archaeology -- or certain members of it -- has long since led the world to have serious doubts about the quality of its research output......... as we have pointed out many times on this blog.
ReplyDeleteBeen a long time since I worked on any of UCL's projects. The Archaeology department said that our (engineering) research was rubbish (at the time it was a company project), so the company had to stop supplying services. You can't do research work for other parts of the University if one part puts in writing that your research is pseudoscience. I still get calls asking for help. Used to be vague about why we couldn't supply services, but have recently started to explain the circumstances.
ReplyDeleteThe new work has been noticed by the LiveScience website, in an article entitled "The Mystery Of Stonehenge's Altar Stone Just Got Even More Confusing" (https://www.iflscience.com/the-mystery-of-stonehenges-altar-stone-just-got-even-more-confusing-75856), but without apparently casting doubt on the reliability of any of the recent work that has caused the confusion.
ReplyDeleteYes, I saw that -- and there are various other media reports on the latest "shock" in the Altar Stone story. Typical shallow reporting, with nobody apparently capable of reading the articles and assessing the quality of the research work involved!
ReplyDelete