Tuesday 10 November 2015

Durrington Walls Superhenge - Mike Parker Pearson; “The smart money is that the stones are not actually stones”

From a fascinating article by The New York Times about the recent discoveries around Stonehenge

....Buried in the banks of Durrington Walls are about 90 standing stones, some up to 15 feet tall. Dr. Gaffney said there may originally have been 200, more than twice as many as at Stonehenge. “That tells you the scale of this thing,” he said.

If true, that would jumble Dr. Parker Pearson’s differentiation of Durrington Walls as the land of the living from Stonehenge, the land of the dead. But he is skeptical of the findings, which have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

He said that a decade ago, he excavated some of those locations and found post holes that had been capped with cemented chalk. The radar reflections had bounced off the chalk blocks, he said.

“The smart money is that the stones are not actually stones,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. He said he and Dr. Gaffney had discussed their differing interpretations. “We’ll dig a hole next year to resolve the issue once and for all,” he said.....

The horrible phrase Ground Truthing is apt, I can't wait to find out.

2 comments:

  1. “We’ll dig a hole next year to resolve the issue once and for all,” - sums it up quite neatly. Archaeology is such a farce at present it takes two years to dig a pilot hole and check the GPR results - bring back time-team they could have done it in three days and stopped all this nonsense!!

    RJL

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  2. and then a few years to publish the results.....

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