Stonehenge…Live! The post-mortem

Alun The Past 3 Comments , , , , ,

I’m writ­ing this up June 23. Yes, I write some entries that far in advance. It’s how the daily updates hap­pen at 9:00 exactly. I file a bunch at once and let the com­puter auto-post. It means I can work on my PhD with no dis­trac­tions, or at least no blog related dis­trac­tions. It also means that I can go back and re-edit entries, though tak­ing a few days before start­ing writ­ing this entry means I’m not going to be as scath­ing as I could have been. Just as well. I didn’t think Stone­henge Live was that bad, just dis­ap­point­ing and a bit of a missed opportunity.

Foamhenge lit by a rising artificial moon
Foam­henge by the light of an arti­fi­cial moon.

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The SEAC Conference starts

Alun The Past 4 Comments ,

Today is the first ses­sion of the SEAC con­fer­ence. They star­ted with a meet ‘n’ greet last night. I’m not there, I have work to do. This will be the first year in quite a while when there isn’t a new book pub­lished at the meet­ing. Nor­mally the pro­ceed­ings of a con­fer­ence are ref­er­eed and then pub­lished two years later. How­ever the 2003 con­fer­ence was a micro-conference so the papers are get­ting bundled into the 2004 volume, which is due 2006. Read­ers who work in the sci­ences may find this hard to believe, but this is con­sidered speedy.

So today I’ll prob­ably be grouchy because I’m miss­ing out on sites like the one below. It’s a Nur­a­ghe a Bronze Age tomb for­ti­fied dwell­ing. Not miss­ing them so much that I’d actu­ally pay to go to Sardinia though :)

A Nuraghe
Nur­a­ghe Pal­mavera. Photo by Dave2002.

More Mysticism

Alun Science 1 Comment ,

The Skeptic's CircleI’m told that June 26’s post wasn’t my first exper­i­ence with the New Age at West Ken­net. I don’t remem­ber my first trip there, which was when I was five. My Da does though.

Inside West Kennet Long Barrow
Inside the West Ken­net long barrow

We went on a fam­ily trip one sum­mer. I went run­ning off and climbed up the bar­row to look around. There’s not a lot to see from the top of the bar­row apart from fields. There’s Sil­bury Hill, but when you’re five you don’t real­ise that hills aren’t meant to be per­fect hill shapes. I did man­age to find some­thing interesting.

Who­ever restored the site had given some thought to illu­min­a­tion. Long bar­rows are nat­ur­ally dark places. In this case the con­crete roof built into the site wouldn’t have helped. To solve this prob­lem little sky­lights were fixed into the con­crete. They were trans­lu­cent, so you could see through them but from the inside they let a little light in. I was five, so I thought stamp­ing on it might be a good idea.

It was a ter­rific idea.

The bar­row was hol­low, so I found that by stamp­ing on the sky­light I could make a big boom noise. For a five year old this is the a dis­cov­ery as excit­ing as find­ing a new planet or a new con­tin­ent. So I stamped and I stamped. Boom. Boom. Boom. My Da came up to see what trouble I was get­ting into*. He saw what I was doing and, being a respons­ible par­ent, told me to stop it. Being curi­ous he then had a stamp him­self. I took that as a sig­nal that I could stamp too and we got quite a rhythm going. We car­ried on doing this until my da was dis­trac­ted by some people leav­ing the bar­row. They were plainly stoned, but non­ethe­less also ter­ribly excited. He caught the word “heartbeat”.

This doesn’t mean that all mys­tical exper­i­ences in bar­rows are fake, but if you’re an ardent believer of paranor­mal stuff it’s use­ful to remem­ber it’s not just the truth that’s out there. I am too.

*the thought that I was half a mile from any­where and there­fore couldn’t get into trouble never crossed his mind.

Graffiti Archaeology?

Alun Life 6 Comments

I won’t men­tion Athena’s blog and how she’s tak­ing apart altern­at­ive archae­ology claims because I’ve got a post on Gra­ham Han­cock lined up for July 2.

Instead I’ll point out Sav­age Minds again where Sus­pirium Puel­larum Celadus Thraex points out archae­ology blogs I didn’t know of A Vis­ible City and Graf­fiti Archae­ology News.

Graffiti
Under­wa­ter Spin­ning by Eric in SF.

I do remem­ber vaguely see­ing Graf­fiti Archae­ology earlier in the year, strug­gling with the nav­ig­a­tion and won­der­ing ‘what’s the point?’ It works as art, but without any com­ment­ary on the sub­ject is it archae­ology? The col­lec­tion of past images strike me more as Graf­fiti Anti­quar­i­an­ism. It might be some­thing you do archae­ology with, but without thought as to the mean­ing or use of the graf­fiti I can’t see how it is archae­olo­gical. Hope­fully someone can cor­rect me and point me to where the dis­cus­sion of mean­ing is.

It’s prob­ably just me being jeal­ous for not hav­ing a Webby des­pite hav­ing this site run­ning for lit­er­ally weeks. :)

Isn’t Kraftwerk Wonderful?

Alun Life No Comments , ,

Kraft­werk have just released a new live album Min­imum Max­imum which pretty much under­lines the obvi­ous. They’re geni­uses. Live albums can be awful, with the band drop­ping the gui­tar, singing off key or at their worst tak­ing the oppor­tun­ity for ter­minal drum solos to see if the song can out­live a fair pro­por­tion of the audi­ence. This is the only album I know of where people com­plain that a track, Auto­bahn, is a mere nine minutes long, rather than the twenty-two it was on the ori­ginal album.

In terms of influ­ence they’re the elec­tronic Beatles. A new band could carve out a suc­cess­ful career rip­ping off their works. This isn’t just true of eighties bands, com­pare The Robots to Daft Punk’s recent Robot Rock.

The com­mon com­plaint by poodle-rockers is that elec­tronic music lacks soul. Listen­ing to Trans-Europe Express whilst trav­el­ling, even if it’s into Leicester, is an awe­some exper­i­ence. I can’t ima­gine Bön Jovi cap­tur­ing the eurphoria of adding and sub­tract­ing like Kraft­werk can on Pocket Cal­cu­lator. And then very few bands could also pull off some­thing with the fra­gile beauty of Neon Lights.

But most won­der­ful of all they have proper hair­cuts. Who cares if they’re not in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame? They’re too good for that.

A band with proper haircuts.
A band with a proper haircut.

…and now I’ve dis­covered you can’t link to audio clips at Amazon. Ho hum.

I get on with some Pagans

Alun Life, Politics 1 Comment ,

A busy day at West Kennet Long Barrow
A photo care­fully angled to hide most of the tour­ists out­side West Ken­net Long Bar­row, because I hadn’t planned on writ­ing up the visit this way.

I decided to take some time to tour Ave­bury recently. Along the way I stopped off around Sil­bury Hill and took the short trek up to West Ken­net. It’s a long bar­row, a tomb dat­ing from the Stone Age. Effect­ively it’s a house of the dead. Huge stones were used to build a long nar­row pas­sage­way with side cham­bers and then the whole thing was covered in earth. They’re strange places because rather than each cham­ber being for an indi­vidual or a fam­ily, it seems to have been a type of bone. So people’s fore­arms were put together in one place, ribs in another and so on. Com­ing up on this day I noticed the out­side had quite a large num­ber of vis­it­ors out­side. I found out why when I went to go inside. A group were try­ing to have a col­lect­ive chant in there.
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Archaeology on TV could be worse

Alun Politics No Comments , , ,

Rex at Sav­age Minds has had a jaw about The Indi­ana Jones thing, which raises some ser­i­ous ques­tions about the image of anthro­po­logy in the US. The com­ments are also worth read­ing. For­tu­nately this isn’t such a prob­lem in the UK. One is that archae­olo­gists are thought of as grubby his­tor­i­ans in the UK. Even in the lib­rar­ies of many uni­ver­sit­ies you’ll find archae­ology shelved with his­tory away from the rest of anthro­po­logy. In Leicester Anthro­po­logy is on a dif­fer­ent floor. The other is we have Time Team, which on the whole is a good thing.

Time Team’s been going for yonks now, and it’s the biggest pull into archae­ology at uni­ver­sity level. You can ask the under­gadu­ates what archae­ology they’ve read and they’ll look at you blankly, but men­tion Time Team and they can all tell you their favour­ite epis­ode. Even Gra­ham Han­cock doesn’t get a look-in.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, the Time Team visit a site and then excav­ate to find some­thing out about it over three days. Three days is the limit, it’s just an explor­at­ory excav­a­tion. The cam­eras fol­low the archae­olo­gists about and film them as they dig. It sounds like it should be as fas­cin­at­ing as watch­ing paint dry. Dig­ging, on the whole is repet­it­ive busi­ness and shouldn’t make good TV. What spices it up is that the show is one hour long and they com­press everything into it. So as well as the find­ing things bit, you also see them arrive explain what they expect to find from pre­vi­ous data, what the prob­lem they hope to solve is and then all the pro­spect­ing includ­ing vari­ous Geo­phys­ical toys. The icing on the cake is they never lose site of the prob­lem they’ve set. If some­thing is found then they ask what does this mean for our under­stand­ing of the site as a whole. They also show the import­ance of con­text. It’s not just that a brooch is pretty, but that where it was found allows a phase of the build­ing to be dated, so aid­ing our under­stand­ing in a way that merely see­ing a lump of metal can’t.

There are prob­lems. Some stu­dents struggle to under­stand that you can’t solve every prob­lem in the world in just three days. Nor do many units have the funds to throw at a site that the Time Team has. That’s no fault of the pro­gramme because it’s what hap­pens when you treat the audi­ence like they’re intel­li­gent, and that’s the best bit of Time Team.

Sup­pose they find a build­ing because of crop­marks. In any other pro­gramme there would be a minute lost while the presenter asks “What exactly is a crop­mark?” The Time Team approach is that they’ve covered this often enough in the past that they don’t need to explain how crop­marks work in great detail. They simply say the crop­marks show whatever and talk about what it means. Because they’re not stop­ping each step of the pro­cess to explain the basics to a seven-year-old or someone like a Daily Mail reader, they can talk more about what is inter­est­ing about the archaeology.

So while there are gripes that you can aim at Time Team, it does archae­ology in the UK a huge ser­vice because it means the under­gradu­ates com­ing onto the courses at least have some idea of what archae­ology is about. When drunk they’re far more likely to shout “Oi you, get out of my trench!” than “THAT — BELONGS — IN — A — MUSEUM!” And that’s a good thing.

I do won­der if Rex is show­ing his age slightly :) . The hippest archae­olo­gist in the UK at the moment is Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider. No great improvement.

The Trireme Veterans for Truth are back too! Hurrah!

Alun Digital Academia, Life 2 Comments

I’ll have to remem­ber to add them both back into the link panel. Their return is her­al­ded by an ana­lysis of Michael Shanks’s hit count. They argue from a very math­em­at­ic­ally sound pos­i­tion that 409,908 hits divided by eleven months does not equal 60k hits a month, but rather 37,264. I think their ana­lysis is flawed on two counts. One is that it assumes the hits are evenly dis­trib­uted through the eleven months. If 37,264 is the mean point and the hits climb at a con­stant rate from zero when it star­ted then it would be equally reas­on­able to assume archaeolog’s hit rate is 74,528 a month. 60k hits a month sounds plaus­ible. Still, I can’t get too worked up about it because it’s irrel­ev­ant if you think about what a hit is.
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Stonehenge Bluestone Discovery

Alun The Past 2 Comments , ,

I picked up a press release last night on the dis­cov­ery of the source of the blue­stones for Stone­henge. Bournemouth Uni­ver­sity have very kindly sent me some pho­tos to go with it, which arrived this morn­ing. I’d be grate­ful if no-one hot­linked to them, partly because of my band­width troubles and also because they’re not mine as the copy­right notices show.

Lead­ing Stone­henge expert, Pro­fessor Tim Dar­vill of Bournemouth Uni­ver­sity, believes he has dis­covered the answer to one of the stone circle’s old­est mys­ter­ies – the exact loc­a­tion in Wales where Stonehenge’s ‘magical’ blue­stones were quar­ried cen­tur­ies ago.

Writ­ing in the July/August issue of ‘Brit­ish Archae­ology’, Pro­fessor Dar­vill describes the very spot high in the Pre­seli Hills of Pem­broke­shire from where the blue­stones – which form the inner circle of Stone­henge – were trans­por­ted, some 240 miles west of Salis­bury Plain.

What Pro­fessor Dar­vill and his col­league Geoff Wain­wright believe they have found are the remains of a stone enclos­ure. Pro­fessor Dar­vill describes a “small crag-edged promon­tory with a stone bank across its neck” in one of the most elev­ated parts of Carn Menyn. The enclos­ure is small (less than half a hec­tare) but accord­ing to Pro­fessor Dar­vill it provides a ver­it­able ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of made-to-measure pil­lars for aspir­ing circle builders.

Detail of the excavation through the stone boundary on the north side of the Carn Menyn Enclosure
Detail of the excav­a­tion through the stone bound­ary on the north side of the Carn Menyn Enclos­ure. Pho­to­graph by Timothy Dar­vill © 2005 Bournemouth Uni­ver­sity and SPACES.

“Within and out­side the enclos­ure are numer­ous prone pil­lar stones with clear signs of work­ing,” he writes. “Some are fairly recent and a hand­ful of drill holes attest to the tech­no­logy used. Other blocks may have been wrenched from the ground or the crags in ancient times with sim­pler, but no less effi­cient, tech­no­lo­gies that leave no trace.

Excavation of the Carn Menyn Enclosure boundary wall in April 2005
Excav­a­tion of the Carn Menyn Enclos­ure bound­ary wall in April 2005. Pho­to­graph by Timothy Dar­vill © 2005 Bournemouth Uni­ver­sity and SPACES.

“Three things are clear from just look­ing round the site,” Prof Dar­vill con­cludes. “First, those out­crops have been exploited as a source of stone for a long time and much has been taken away. Second, our under­stand­ing of what a ‘quarry’ is per­haps needs to be mod­i­fied because here the extrac­tion of pil­lars simply involves lever­ing suit­ably shaped but nat­ur­ally detached blocks from the ground or a frac­tured out­crop. And third, the remote­ness of the place and its moun­tain – top situ­ation invite com­par­ison with other known sources of prized stone, exploited for axeheads dur­ing the fourth and third mil­len­nia BC.”

Carn Menyn, Pembrokeshire, main source of the bluestones used in the central circles at Stonehenge
Carn Menyn, Pem­broke­shire, main source of the blue­stones used in the cent­ral circles at Stone­henge. View look­ing north­east. Pho­to­graph by Timothy Dar­vill © 2005 Bournemouth Uni­ver­sity and SPACES.

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You too can help fund Islamic terrorists with a few pretty antiquities

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

History Carnival ButtonThis has been sat in the drafts pile for a while. I’ve been writ­ing and re-writing because I don’t want to have the post get lost in the rights or wrongs of the occu­pa­tion of Iraq. I simply wanted to high­light a ser­i­ous prob­lem. I’ve moved it up because Cronaca notes the Guard­ian story that illi­cit excav­a­tion of antiquit­ies may be help­ing fund ter­ror­ists in Iraq and sug­gests tak­ing the story with a moun­tain of salt. I’m not so dis­missive. The pic­ture below shows just one site.

Iraq, Cultural Heritage Sites
Umma, a Sumerian cap­tial city, trashed. The smooth bits are the unex­cav­ated patches. Photo from the WMF.

The entire coun­try of Iraq has been placed on the World Monu­ment Watch 100 most endangered sites list. This fol­lows con­tin­ued law­less­ness and whole­sale loot­ing of ancient sites in the country.

This isn’t any­thing new. SAFE records a ongo­ing fail­ure to act to pre­serve Iraqi her­it­age. The prob­lem con­tin­ues. There are now large areas of the coun­try where illi­cit excav­at­ors can oper­ate. Con­trol is now so weak that items can be stolen to order and shipped to Saudi Ara­bia and else­where. So far the loot appears to be stored but it should in time be pos­sible to fence the goods on the antiquit­ies market.

Now obvi­ously I’d like to make clear to Christie’s, Sotheby’s and espe­cially their law­yers that I’m not sug­gest­ing for one moment that they’d sell goods if an Islamic fun­da­ment­al­ist turned up on their door­step with a sack of loot. How­ever I’m not totally con­vinced that their checks are suf­fi­cient to stop them from unwit­tingly selling illi­cit mater­ial. I don’t make this charge lightly. Below is a dia­gram from Ian Stead’s book on the Salis­bury Hoard. The Salis­bury Hoard was illeg­ally excav­ated in the UK and fenced through the Lon­don mar­ket. See how many names you recognise.

Diagram of how illicit antiquities were fenced through the London Antiquities trade
Dia­gram of trade of illi­cit mater­ial. From Ian Steads’s Salis­bury Hoard

It’s hard to argue that some­thing isn’t very wrong in the antiquit­ies mar­ket, when illi­cit goods can be passed around like that. It’s amaz­ing the Brit­ish Museum was even able to spot some­thing was amiss. It’s also worth not­ing that all the antiquit­ies going over­seas should have had export licences. I don’t know how many did. It must drive hon­est antiquit­ies deal­ers mad with rage. I’m amazed you don’t hear the major auc­tion houses demand­ing a crack­down on the people who bring their trade into disrepute.

It’s safe to assume that there is the demand and the means of sup­ply­ing it once the mater­ial is out of Iraq.

Now all we have to do work out sort of per­son is able to work in the remote parts of Iraq where there’s a bunch armed vicious Islamic fun­da­ment­al­ists run­ning amok. If we could also work out some sort of con­nec­tion between the pre­sumed first link in the antiquit­ies chain, deal­ers in Saudi Ara­bia and Jordan, and the for­eign insur­gents in Iraq. Bad­ger­minor at Orbis Quin­tus has some idea where they might come from.

I don’t think you need a moun­tain of salt. The one ray of sun­shine is the people who go and do this are the ones who get ripped off. Buy buy­ing antiquit­ies you could well be help­ing fund ter­ror­ists, but by far the lar­ger amount of profit will be siphoned off into organ­ised crime. So that’s alright.

Links you might be inter­ested in:
SAFE: Sav­ing Antiquit­ies for Every­one
The Illi­cit Antiquit­ies Research Centre

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