Boilerplate Archaeology 2
I sat down to read New Scientist yesterday morning. I’m buying regularly it now, so I can’t tell if they’ve dumbed down or I’ve matured. Anyhow the reviews section is always worth a read.
This week there’s a review of Big Weather by Mark Svenvold. Mark Svenvold is not a professional tornado-chaser himself, but has been hanging out with them to write his new book. “What relevance to Boilerplate Archaeology does this have?” you may ask. Well to quote from the review:
Svenvold grants the origins of tornado watching to ancient British pioneers because “Archaeologists believe that 5000 years ago the inhabitants of Stonehenge honoured the storm god by digging ditches parallel to the tracks of tornadoes.”
How would this work exactly?
The safest way would be to dig the ditches after the tornado has blown out. But why then dig the dig parallel to the path, why not dig over the path? Wouldn’t the place where the tornado touched the earth be more sacred that an arbitrary parallel path n metres away from the tornado’s route?
The only reason for digging parallel to the route I can think of is that digging was done while the tornado was there, and it was simply too dangerous to dig in the tornado. I’m trying hard to visualise people digging a ditch and tracking a tornado, but the only excavator I can think of with the skills do this fast enough is Bugs Bunny. I might be overlooking something obvious, but it looks like this theory took a wrong turn near Albuquerque.
But you can’t blame Svenvold for this if archaeologists are proposing these tornado paths. Who? I did a search on Antiquity’s database and only found one reference to tornadoes, in a review of The Stonehenge Solution by Terence Meaden – atmospheric physicist formerly of Dalhousie University, Canada, with an interest in… tornadoes. Though this isn’t entirely fair as I think he works in the UK now.
Is this plausible? I’ll finish with a quote from the review in Antiquity by megalithic expert Aubrey Burl:
The Stonehenge Solution is an over-confident fantasia offering some acceptable archaeology and some provocative ideas but with a thesis that tempts but does not overcome because the evidence lacks penetration.
Aubrey Burl Antiquity vol66 #253 Dec 1992. p987-8
—–
Comments