Boilerplate Archaeology

The editor of Scientific American is taking an interest in The Onion and Boilerplate Science (via Keat’s Telescope). It’s a look at generic science stories that you know are coming up in the next few months, like a gene for ________ being identified in mice complete with a picture of a normal white mouse to illustrate what a mouse looks like. Here’s my attempt at a story which you’ll see sometime in the next month and a half.

For more than 4000 years Stonehenge has remained shrouded in mystery. Some researchers have Stonehenge was the site of a solar temple. Others say it was an astronomical computer. Some have even argued it was alien spaceport.

Now a University of somewhere not near Stonehenge researcher claims to have solved the puzzle. Name, a (anything but an archaeologist) has identified Stonehenge as a giant (object usually associated with whatever it is that the person does for a job). “Neolithic people were keenly aware of the rôle objects played in society and built Stonehenge as to capture the power of object to predict/control _________. Name noticed the striking similarity whilst on holiday in England for Easter.

In a paper to be published in the Journal of not Archaeology, Name states that the people who built Stonehenge around (insert a single date for the multi phase site) BC were obsessed with regeneration and death, but there is no evidence of rebirth/sex/death (chose an option) anywhere near the site. Name said: “This is proves Stonehenge was not about option (ignore contrary evidence in next field) but a place (of life/for the dead).”

The famed astronomical alignments at Stonehenge support the theory. “Summer would have been a time of plenty when people gave thanks to the (mother goddess/ancestors) through ritual use of object. In the winter the people of Stonehenge would pray for regeneration and seek to restore fertility to the land,” says Name.

So far the controversial theory has failed to impress experts. Name 2, of English Heritage, said; “It’s certainly an imaginative idea, but it cannot really be tested. It’s rather like searching for patterns in clouds. You can see anything in Stonehenge if you stare long enough. The archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes perhaps summed it up best when she said ‘every age gets the Stonehenge it desires.’ This theory probably tells us more about about the 21st century AD than the 21st century BC.”

This could be a series that runs and runs. I was going to do something about the fantastically preserved mummies found in the deserts of Egypt, but the BBC have beaten me to it again. Perhaps I could write up the discovery of the earliest _______ which proves Neanderthals might not have been as primitive as once thought. —–