A very silly rant from the pet rock boys

 

Well, this is rather entertaining -- and more than a little pathetic.  Pearce, Bevins, Ixer and Scourse have put together a furious synthetic rant designed to question my competence and destroy my credibility.  It's just been published in Quaternary Newsletter:

Pearce, N., Bevins, R., Ixer, R. and Scourse, J.  2024.  Comment on "An igneous erratic at Limeslade, Gower, and the Glaciation of the Bristol Channel" by Brian John.  Quaternary Newsletter 163, pp 15 - 20.

Also very entertaining is Tim Daw's instant report on his blog.  Ah, the faithful retainer can always be relied on to help his muckers when they are in a spot of bother.  His report, with carefully selected quotes, is flagged up as "the professional response" to my Limeslade article !!  It's quite touching to see such blind loyalty from an amateur.

Maybe you shouldn't be too surprised.  I'm not surprised at all.........

As readers of this blog will know, my short article published earlier this year presented some preliminary information on the Limeslade boulder, including pXRF data kindly provided by the late Prof Tim Darvill, and assessed its importance in the debate about the glaciation of the Bristol Channel.  In the article I recognised the shortcomings of just three readings from one sample from the boulder, and looked forward to seeing more intensive and detailed analyses of other samples from the boulder by other researchers.  I said: "There is inadequate data for the creation of scatter diagrams or bivariate graphs involving the Limeslade boulder ppm readings. So it is not possible at present to say that the pXRF readings occupy a different visualised “compositional space” for trace elements than the readings for the Preseli tors."

Not everybody has access to research funds and top class laboratory facilities, and when Prof Tim Darvill and Dr Steve Parry offered to help in obtaining pXRF readings, I was grateful for their involvement. 

Instead of accepting this preliminary work with good grace as a starting point for future research, Pearce et al  have subjected it to detailed -- and it has to be said, obsessively aggressive and petulant -- scrutiny, while in the process questioning the competence of other geologists whose notes I reproduced word for word.  I am at a loss as to why these four academics have allowed themselves to be sucked into this absurd spat.  They cannot possibly come out of it with any credit.

In the second part of their article Pearce et al accuse me of  "a polemic against the advocates of human transport (e.g. Parker Pearson et al., 2021)".  I strongly refute that.  My assessment of the human transport thesis (on pp 10 and 11) is carefully phrased, and constitutes a straightforward review of the narrative developed over the last decade by Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins and others.  Indeed, my comments are supported by the dramatic retreats made by these authors from the spectacular claims they were making just a few years ago.  These retreats (for example on Waun Mawn) are well known to all who read the literature.

The latter part of the Pearce et al article relates to the glaciation / sea ice transport issue, and I take issue with almost everything that they say.  I will revisit that in a later post.  I will not accept snide comments from people who have apparently never done any field work in West Wales relating to the Quaternary stratigraphic sequence.  Nor will I accept a "holier than thou" attitude from geologists who have, over the last decade, refused to cite "inconvenient literature" or to accept that any of their ideas are questioned or disputed by anybody else.

As for their parting shot:  "This article merely represents a disingenuous cover to justify a rehearsal
of the now well-worn and increasingly tedious debate concerning transport of the Stonehenge bluestones."  That really is beneath contempt.  The article I published was fashioned in part by the constructive comments of the journal editor and referees. The "tedious debate" to which Pearce et al  refer has been fuelled and perpetrated by an endless stream of journal and popular science magazine articles which they themselves have written, many of them recycling the same basic data, designed to promote the strange fantasy that the Preseli bluestones at Stonehenge were targetted, quarried and transported by our Neolithic ancestors.

Watch this space........

Details:

Brian John, 2024. An Igneous Erratic at Limeslade, Gower & the Glaciation of the Bristol Channel. Quaternary Newsletter 162, June 2024. pp 4 - 14.

The article is freely accessible, and can be downloaded here:

https://www.qra.org.uk/quaternary-newsletter/quaternary-newsletter-current/

It is also on Researchgate, and can be accessed here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381775577_Quaternary_Newsletter_Article_AN_IGNEOUS_ERRATIC_AT_LIMESLADE_GOWER_AND_THE_GLACIATION_OF_THE_BRISTOL_CHANNEL