You should always be very suspicious when a team of archeologists with a TV production team finds something new and revolutionary on the exact topic they were making a TV program about...
Seems a bit too convenient!
Especially when the evidence is a muddy hole nearly the same shape and size as a rock 150 miles away...
Oh, and look - it just so happens to be on the only farm you could get permission to dig on!
BA, PhD, FBA, FSA, FSA Scot, MIFA. Professor of British Later Prehistory.
Do I believe him or a random software engineer on HN who thinks it might be "a bit too convenient"? Hmm. Tricky one.
I know a guy who crossed the Channel on a tiny little narrowboat meant for 3ft-deep canals. The entire thing was filmed. The TV programme hammed it up and made it seem like an entirely haphazard endeavour. Of course it was playing to the camera. That doesn't mean he didn't cross the Channel. He did.
Adding a bunch of letters to the end of your name doesn't make you less susceptible to the allure of fame and money. In fact the type of person to add alphabet soup to the end of their name might be even more susceptible!
Uhhh, yes. But only in fields where they are not already an expert.
What you're referring to is Nobel Prize disease, and that is essentially the implicit human assumption that when you become an expert at one thing, you're an expert at everything. However it notably does not happen when someone is an expert at something, because well, they're an expert -- they know enough about the field to separate the wheat from the chaff
Like the parent says, I'm not sure why you'd rather believe a software engineer on Hacker News -- who unless they are unusual, has zero experience with archeology outside of watching Time Team occasionally -- versus someone who is actually qualified in that field.
This is the kind of thinking that led to the catastrophe that was MetaMed -- software engineers and mathematicians not realising that they needed to actually learn things about other fields to be an expert in it (Unlike computer science where you can read a few well-curated blogposts and understand most of the problems in a week), and deciding to go into Medicine with that mindset (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/MetaMed).
Well, the "kind of thinking" that only certified, acronym'd Domain Experts have useful knowledge to contribute about complicated problems has led us down a lot of fun paths in 2020:
- No, definitely no need to worry about this novel virus in China
- No, definitely no need to wear facial covering
- No, definitely no aerosolized transmission
- No, definitely no reason to violate protocol with a 1-dose regimin
- No, definitely no evidence of lab-release accident (TBD)
On each of these problems, attentive and interested non-experts called the correct answer months ahead of expert consensus. If your takeaway from 2020 is not "domain experts are always right, and there's no need for independent research from the outside"... you learned a really bad lesson.
Most of those were political decisions, not ones made by domain experts.
First, the delay of listening to domain experts (In america, the firing of any teams and staff that were trained in dealing with a pandemic, for example), and the delay in shutting down cross-country transportation as well as the delay in implementing social-distancing, led to the large spread of Coronavirus that is continuing to this day.
Secondly, the reason people were informed not to wear masks initially was because there was a PPE shortage. Part of this was very likely related to the fact that I remember reports of people stealing boxes of masks from hospitals, and people stockpiling masks early on, which led to hospitals that were much less equipped to deal with the spread of it and led to higher deaths of healthcare workers.
The reason Coronavirus got to the stage where it could mutate, at least in Britain, was because the Government instituted a policy of blatantly letting people die and assuming "herd immunity" would take hold, versus actually listening to the domain experts saying that was a shitty idea.
If they had listened to them in the first place, and shut things down early on, the pandemic still wouldn't be going a year later. As you can see in China, Taiwan, etc.
> Most of those were political decisions, not ones made by domain experts.
One thing to think about is when domain experts speak on behalf of political/regulatory organizations, it's the organization making a statement, not the person sharing their honest personal opinions.
If your takeaway from 2020 is not "domain experts are always right, and there's no need for independent research from the outside"... you learned a really bad lesson.
That most certainly is not my takeaway, but perhaps you mistyped. What I had reinforced in 2020, however, was that though domain experts occasionally make a bad call (including you, dear reader), I'd still take their opinion over some random jackass on the Internet spouting off about "yeah, but remember when they told us not to wear masks?"
Likely parent was triggered by GP's comment and is now desperately downplaying expertise as "alphabet soup" and is now downvoting all the comments here
Yes, somebody who sacrificed decades of their life attaining accreditations and studying said area of expertise clearly knows less than a software dev /s
He was a medical doctor, right? I can't be bothered to argue it in public but I don't really listen to doctors on anything outside what they practice in - they aren't scientists and aren't trained as such.
Oh, and look - it just so happens to be on the only farm you could get permission to dig on!
This is somewhat tautological - of course archaeologists make discoveries on the sites they are digging on. It's very hard to make discoveries at sites that you aren't allowed on!
I'm not much of a one for write-ups I confess, but broadly:
The raw data comes from the Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales as .asc files, which are just a big 2d array of height values in text file, in this case covering 1km2 each.
I downloaded all these and wrote a script to produce .png tiles using a "hill shading" algorithm, i.e. make pixel darker if pixel to top left is taller, using C#.
Once I was getting nice results I rented a hefty server at AWS to run it on the whole dataset for 24 hours, generating 2 million .png files, then used leafletjs to display them slippy map style.
I was originally hosting the tiles on AWS but the egress fees were too much so I move them all to a 3€/month bare metal arm server at Scaleway.
The 3D stuff re-fetches the raw .asc files from the source agencies on demand using a AWS Lambda script which cuts out the 1km2 of interest and passes it back to the web server, which renders it using three.js for the surface texture mode, or potree for the pointcloud version.
The website itself is built in asp.net core, running on a $10/month box at Digital Ocean.
The Environment Agency are currently running a programme aiming for full coverage (of England) completing this year. Once that is ready I'll have to regenerate all my map tiles and hopefully have all the remaining gaps filled in then.
Natural Resources Wales is aiming for similar by Winter 2022 apparently.
Can someone explain the association between the (scammy) domain name and the really cool tool? What’s the story behind it? What am I looking at? That’s not their data, is it?
The parent site is also mine. Believe it or not some people have occasionally said that's cool too, despite the scammy domain name! (It's not that bad is it!?)
The lidar map is kind of a side project within a side project. It's the first and so far only experiment within the 'Lab' section of the parent site (https://houseprices.io/lab) where I had intended to try all manner of stuff with mapping and open data etc.
It didn't exactly grow to be another Google Labs in the end. It did last longer though.
The parent site is definitely cool. I'm currently in the position of looking for somewhere cheap to move to and not really having much in the way of geographical constraints, and other UK sites like Rightmove are decidedly unhelpful there - they really want you to commit to an area first. Being able to just pootle around at random zooming hither and yon is nice.
One of the best collection of images of the Chernobyl disaster is hidden away on some marketing companies website. I've lost the link but it just comes up with a list of files as opposed to a bunch of web stuff.
I think the inclusion for Glastonbury Tor is particularly useful, because the LIDAR perfectly shows the terraces that were already discussed in that section of the article.
In the past, I have scanned many hand-drawn (engraving) pictures in Victorian tomes of County Histories in my local library, to get topographies of hillfort sites for Wikipedia (mainly in the SW of England). I will now start to add these LIDAR images. Better to scan the ground itself than to scan a print of an engraving of a hand-drawn picture by some tweed-jacketed Victorian archaeology dude.
If hanoz has any issues with the copyright attributions and CC BY 4.0 license on wikicommons, I would be glad to correct any mistakes, or add more praise for the glorious hanoz :)
I don't know about this data specifically, but the best thing you can do is lobby for better open data laws. The UK, to be fair, passed laws like this maybe 20 years ago, and as a result there's an amazing amount of free data available for England and Wales (Scotland is normally different).
There's an EU directive supposed to solve this, but it's a slow, slow process.
Oh and look there just happen to be several bluestones that geologically match the ones at Stonehenge still on the site, and radiocarbon dating puts the site a few hundred years older than Stonehenge so the timeline happens to line up perfectly. How convenient!
I'm not saying I believe them for sure, but yours is in no way a fair characterisation.
>>Is it really that reliable to make such precise statements?
Carbon dating is never enough in itself. They are not saying that carbon dating proves that one thing happened before the other. They are saying that carbon dating does not disprove it, that the narrative they propose is not contradicted by carbon evidence. The fact that there are multi-century error bands means it can never be solid proof, but the fact that one error band is centered years later than the other does add weight to their proposed timeline. Carbon dating is a fuzzy telescope, but lack of perfect resolution doesn't mean it cannot produce useful evidence.
Samples at the site were dated to around 3400 BC, which is 400 years earlier than the earliest samples from Stonehenge. Ive not seen the papers, but given standard techniques I expect there should be at least a couple of centuries gap between the error ranges.
You date stuff associated with the rock. Digging tools found under the rock (eg worked antler). Remains of wood that was used to move the stone or line the pits. Remnants of possible associated cooking fires. If you find a deer skull or bit of leather under a large stone, it is safe to say that the two are related in time.
The article doesn't say that the TV crew surreptitiously discovered the hole.
It's just as likely that archeologists unaffiliated with BBC came up with this theory months or even years earlier, wanted funding and a bit of publicity for their pet project, got hooked up with BBC, and scheduled the most important part of the excavation to coincide with the arrival of the TV crew as per the funding agreement. The whole point is to maximize the likelihood that an interesting discovery will take place during filming. NatGeo does this all the time, and I'm sure BBC does, too.
Professor Mike says he had long held the theory that the smaller bluestones which surrounded Stonehenge in a wide circle during its earliest phase, had started life as a monument in Wales.
But finding the site of a stone circle which no longer exists, 5,000 years after it was moved, is no mean feat.
The research started in 2010, with excavations beginning in 2012 but as they years went by they experienced many set-backs involving bronze and iron age circles which weren’t what they were looking for.
Mike, 63, did a deal with a TV company to film their progress in 2015.
Two years later, it was a despondent group led by Dave Shaw, who decided to excavate Waun Mawn, an “unpromising” marshy site described as “small and unremarkable” which had turned up nothing in the geophysics surveys.
I'm finding this whole comment thread a bit hard to read, because this is at least the third Stonehenge special Mike Pearson has done with the BBC at this point, not to mention plenty of appearances on Time Team.
You're pretty spot on - this is a well-known archaeologist with an established record as a television presenter. From what I remember of the previous Stonehenge specials, the filming process appeared to be: academic research team does the excavation for a few months, camera crew comes in when a "big moment" is expected, and also films a rollup where the researchers talk over exciting discoveries made in the past months while they're there. They've been digging near Stonehenge and on associated sites along the river for years and years.
Regardless of camera crews, I have a perpetual skepticism of entire disciplines, partly because of my own ignorance, I'm sure. But also partly because I have a BS detector and it goes off a lot.
Largely about all these inferences made about history using so few data points and a brilliant imagination. Really? You could tell all these things about this specific household because of a pot you found?
I'm not sure I have a beef with the scientists themselves. There is value in guesstimating what dinosaurs looked like. But at some point these guesstimates get sold as scientific discovery.
I agree with you on skepticism. But there’s a lot more than just a pot behind theories. The pot is just something they can hold in front of the camera. It’s also the ashy layers in the fireplace, the bone pile outside the building, the greater findings at other digs of the same age and culture.
Exactly, the context in which the object is found is more informative that the object itself. The moment this context is disturbed, e.g. artifacts being pillaged from the site and sold on the black market, the object loses almost all archeological scientific value.
But at some point these guesstimates get sold as scientific discovery.
First example from TFA:
Prof Pearson said the remains of a cow, which was found at the site, suggested animals may have helped to pull the stones to their resting spot in England
What, they didn't use trucks? A much better indication than "we found a skeleton" for these ancients having used oxen to move stones would be any remains at all of the sorts of yokes and related equipment that allow oxen to pull heavy loads. Cattle are primarily of value for their meat and dairy, so the fact that humans and cattle were merely associated at any particular site certainly doesn't mean what the good professor seems to claim.
I kinda feel like they have to, because who funds archeology? If they can earn a living or more money by sensationalizing their discovery and making a documentary about it, more power to them I guess.
For me it is primarily fields that deal with humans. Psychology, Sociology, History, Archeology, Anthropology, etc. I take the findings of all of these with a grain of salt. The problem with all of these fields are the people. It is so very hard to know the motivations of people. It is not at all like studying mathematics, physics, etc. where particles don't have any sort of agency, motivation, etc.
> You could tell all these things about this specific household because of a pot you found?
There's a lot of story in history. Construct a narrative stitched together from different sources. Orators in Greece would do the same thing, remember a few lines and improvise the gaps.
> Most reconstructions are just wishful thinking IMO
It's true, but you have to start somewhere. That's the beauty of it.
It's fine as long as you do it to the best of the current knowledge and tell it.
For fragments of history that are so old, visualization helps put things in context. And if it means you have to erase every reenactment and start over every other year, so be it.
It was the British who stole it, and put it in the British Museum. "Great" British imperialism was common to all areas of GB, and probably of the UK (though Northern Irish history is not in my scope).
Probably safe to argue that one is not from Upper Class/Aristicratic stock to avoid ancestral culpability though.
This reminds me of a natgeo documentary on disney+ called Into the Okavango. It was interesting and I love anything that promotes wild habitats but this came off as more of a production than a documentary.
The actual paper is, as always, less exciting than the breezy PR
TLDR: Three of Stonehenge's stones have long been believed to come from a particular area of Wales. One of them has a pentagonal cross section which was found to approximately matches a pentagonal hole in a partial stone circle in that area, a circle surrounded by a ditch which - coincidentally or otherwise - has the same dimensions as a ditch at Stonehenge. Dating is inconclusive, but evidence supports some of the people cremated at Stonehenge having lived in south Wales for some of their life. It's also established beyond doubt that nearly all the other stones in Stonehenge have no logical connection with this site.
So the builders of Stonehenge might have taken as many as three stones from another site for symbolic or "hey, I know where to find a massive stone the right size for our new project" reasons
> So the builders of Stonehenge might have taken as many as three stones from another site for symbolic or "hey, I know where to find a massive stone the right size for our new project" reasons
If it's 400 years (and the timeline is up for debate), who knows, it may have been a completely different people / culture that decided to move the stone (vs the ones that built the original circle).
I mean in western Europe, town walls were dismantled for other building projects. Walls that still exist are considered protected cultural heritage nowadays. It's a different point of view that changes over time and as cultures progress.
Amusingly I sent this to my nephew who lives close to the site in Wales, he responded 'I thought that was common knowledge, it is what people around here have always claimed'
I love the link to Ireland that at first seems incorrect until you learn that this part of what was part of Ireland in the past.
It indeed seems more like evidence in favour of a long-held theory.
Also though, as the OP says:
> It is already known that the smaller bluestones that were first used to build Stonehenge were transported from 150 miles (240 km) away in modern-day Pembrokeshire.
> But the new discovery suggests the bluestones from Waun Mawn could have been moved as the ancient people of the Preseli region migrated, even taking their monuments with them, as a sign of their ancestral identity.
I don't live in Wales but have definitely heard that before too, the discovery seems to be about larger ones and that they were previously erected (not just mined) in (what is now) Pembrokeshire. Is it definitely that that he thought to be common knowledge, not just that the stones were taken from the region?
I asked him just now and he said he thought it was known that the stones were taken from the stone circle there not just mined there. He hangs out with a lot of alternative types there, who are interested in that sort of thing.
How were they able to accurately match a cross section of a stone that's been in the ground for 5000 years and one that's been above ground in the weather for 5000 years? Wouldn't those have wildly different wear and tear on them?
wait, wasn't this one of the plots of the original Mary Stewart Merlin books, hmm no on reflection Merlin built a standing stones circle to bury his father Ambrosius Aurelianus, not sure if it was supposed to be at Stonehenge he built it.
The uninformed have been saying this for years, the truth is those sarsen stones aren't available in Wales, they exist very close to Stonehenge in other parts of Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire
The sarsen (sandstone) stones most likely came from West Woods, 15 miles from Stonehenge, but there's no known local geological source for the bluestones though. These do seem to have come from Wales somehow. The varied geological origins of the stones has caused a lot of confusion like this.
Seems a bit too convenient!
Especially when the evidence is a muddy hole nearly the same shape and size as a rock 150 miles away...
Oh, and look - it just so happens to be on the only farm you could get permission to dig on!