SciAm and Stonehenge
Scientific American has an article on Stonehenge up this month. My first reaction would be disappointment if I’d bought a copy just to read the Stonehenge article. It’s not bad, but there’s a lot of ideas being generated by archaeologists at the moment. The lack of space means that the three main projects all get skimmed. I can see that it works for someone who hasn’t been following news at the site, but if you’re a henge nut it’ll add nothing new.
On the other hand, I did like the supplementary material that SciAm has added online. This goes into a bit more detail about the work by Birmingham University. Adding this to the original article makes it a lot better. Instead of being standalone, the original article works well as an introduction to the additional material. Without changing a word in the original my opinion has gone from disappointment to thinking it’s actually quite clever. It means the magazine’s website is more than a brochure for the articles, or a copy of them.
It’s also a crafty way of getting their advertising out on other people’s sites, but the wait (if the pre-load advert plays) is worthwhile. The actual video is 5m40s.
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Alun — it’s more disheartening than disappointing.
While there is much new scientific equipment and techniques employed, the overall conclusions are utterly subjective, and amounts to little more than — ‘how people you have never met, perceived landscapes and structures they have never seen’.
From the perspective of a specialist in timber structures, these subjective ideas put forward by Prof Gaffney and others, are more appropriate in religion, than in a subject that aspires to objectivity.
Our faith in the ability of archaeological professors to discern the perceptions and the psychological motivations of people who died 4000 years ago, will ultimately bring the subject into disrepute.
[And yes, there is an objective alternative explanation — it explains archaeological features in technical, rather than psychological terms, and like all good science, it is based on understanding rather belief].
It was the SciAm article I was referring to, not the actual explanations. I used to be very sceptical of Mike Parker Pearson’s ideas, but his recent publications make me think he’s got some interesting proposals connecting Durrington Walls to Stonehenge. For the others, I’ll wait till there’s an article to critique. No article, no long term impact. At least not in academia.
I think some of the wilder theoretical speculations covered will date the work as much as the hairstyles or clothes in the photos, but that’s symptomatic of wider archaeological work. Some archaeologists have a clear idea what they mean when they say ritual but I’m wondering if often it’s used as a shortcut for whose meaning has been forgotten. For comparison there’s Boyer on Religion which I ought to blog.
Alun, interesting article by Boyer; agree. Mike Parker Pearson’s ideas about buildings and structures are demonstrably wrong, and I amazed he has not been found out. Using obscure and complex language is not a substitute for understanding.
My point was the SciAm article implied that the application of modern scientific techniques had given rise to the current ‘understanding’; while the data may be objective, its interpretations very subjective.
I have proposed a model for Class Ei buildings/ aka ‘timber circles’ that explains every aspect of the data, — the precise position, size, and depth of all features; it works on all such structures and is even to some extent predictive.
However, in a world of opinion based archaeology, the idea that an objective model could disprove a subjective one is not even a consideration.