About
The aim of this blog is to discuss ideas that I have or have had about prehistory. For many posts there is no particular agenda, just ideas about particular things, often related to the British Neolithic. However, other posts relate to my current interest: whether it’s possible to see evidence of trade in the activities of prehistoric people across the world and whether it had an influence on the spread of agriculture.
Some of these ideas have been given much thought, some are relatively new and are likely to change. All of them have a high chance of being wrong. I don’t think this matters as it’s better for an idea to be out there and discussed that kept back for fear of being ridiculed.
I was trained as a geologist, but currently I teach electronics, physics and astronomy in an FE college in Swindon, England. I do not have any training in archaeology or history. I realise that professional archeologists and historians have a lot more information at their disposal than I do (sadly it’s quite difficult, without being rich, for a non-academic to access many academic papers). Some of you may think parts of what I say are plain silly.
If you do have criticisms of the posts please be patient with me and post comments letting me know, helpfully, where you think that my ideas are naive or need further work. If you like some of the ideas, I’d love to hear from you. If you want to take any of these ideas further that would be good.
Ned Pegler
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Ned,
I have recently discovered the group of bloggers who have a common interst, albeit quite diverse, in the prehistory of the British Isles and in your case beyond. I am totally unfamiliar with blog sites and their workings. So, I write to you in hopes that you might help me. I chose you because your focus, relative to prehistory, is most practical.
I am neither an archaeologist, an astronomer, a historial, nor a geologist. I claim to be a curious natural philosopher like those who founded modern science little more then 4 centuries ago. My father’s parents immigrated from northern Germany to farm in eastern South Dakota, USA, in the latter part of the 19th Century. I grew up on a farm about two miles from their homestead and farmed while an undergraduate. I taught chemistry in a northern Minnesota community college for 20+ years and since then have invest money and sweat in low cost housing. Toward the end of my teaching career I became a student (by reading) of Louis Agassiz who stated his greatest achievement was that he had taught students to see. I now live in the Williamette Valley of Oregon.
About 11 years ago, I began reading about Stonehenge because I was trying to answer the question: How could prehistoric people have determined the earth’s cardinal directions with good precision? Nearly immediately I began to see things about which I did not find any writings. Because one of my references was Stonehenge Complete by Christopher Chippindale, I began writing a book which I titled Stonehenge More Complete. This book has been a work in progress for these many years and I have decided it would never be published even if I completed it to my satisfaction. I have communicated with Mike Pearson-Parker and he suggested that I share what I have seen and thought with people such as you. As I read the blogs, which I only found because I Googled bluestones, I see I am in general agreement with their concerns that the academic archaeologists have tunnel vision.
Thank you for reading this. I hope you will reply and that we can establish a personal dialogue before I join the bloggers, if I decide to do that. I am going to respond to your introduction: Trade and Farming
Jerry
Dear Jerry
Thanks for your comment. It sounds like you have (had?) a great interest in Stonehenge and know much more about it than me.
Learning is a great thing and my last two or three years of interest in archaeology have taught me much about prehistory but also about the limitations of the internet and about my own naivety.
Academics are easy to criticise for their blinkered approach. However, they are neither more nor less blinkered than everybody else and, more importantly, they use evidence to limit their conclusions. The past has very wide limits on what’s known, so it’s hardly surprising that academics have a wide range of opinions.
For example academics’ speculations about Stonehenge are pretty varied. In the case of the bluestones you will find opinions in academic literature about their arrival on Salisbury Plain at different times (e.g. 100,000BC, 3000BC or 2300BC) and by different means (ice, boat/ropes or a mixture of the two).
However, many people on the internet either don’t know about (due to lack of easily available info) or occasionally are not interested in the limits of knowledge and they argue things which simply can’t be true. What us amateurs (and sometimes academics too) are particularly guilty of is finding two pieces of data that have managed to survive and linking them through cause and effect (e.g. Amesbury Archer builds Stonehenge). I have found that I’m guilty of the same in some of my posts and I now need to rewrite or delete them.
So all I’d say is welcome to the conversation, but don’t always trust me (or others) to know what I’m (we’re) talking about.
best wishes
Ned
Ned,
The focus of Stonehenge More Complete is about Stonehenge but that it not its central purpose or theme. Its central theme is learning. One reason I began writing this book was that modern scholars denigrated, sometimes directly and sometimes subtlety the intelligence of prehistoric people. Intelligence has been defined as the ability to learn and I believe there is evidence that prehistoric people of the British Isles had learned things that these modern scholars do not know.
I do not know how your FE students perform. We, in the USA, know most of our students do not academically perform at the level they once did. Many of us taught during the period of this decline. So, for many more years than 11, we, in chemistry, have been grappling with this problem.
“What us amateurs (and sometimes academics too) are particularly guilty of is finding two pieces of data that have managed to survive and linking them through cause and effect (e.g. Amesbury Archer builds Stonehenge).”
In the other blog you wrote: “Most academics have ignored this [Thom's]work, arguing, justifiably I suppose, that a man’s (or indeed five men’s) pace(s) will average out about the same across the country and maybe this explains the problem without the need of some standard unit.”
Argument has no place in science. The Greek philosophers argued and got most of physical science wrong. Relative to this problem, Richard Feynman (“What Do You Care What Other People Think?”) addressed the National Academy of Sciences in their 1955 autumn meeting. He stated: “I would like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little less direct, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statementso varying degrees of certainty–some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.
“Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question–to doubt–to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus lose what we have gained. Herein lies a responsiblity to society.”
One might reflect upon Feynman’s audience and question why he defined this value of science in 1955. I also suggest that one might Google Louis Agassiz, relative to professor’s Scudder and Shaler, to discover how he taught his students to see.
A fact is, I think, that the founders of modern science were amateurs because modern physical science did not exist before they began questioning what the academics thought.
This is fun. I just reviewed again what you had written and I must respond to “the limitations of the internet and about my own naivety.”
First, the internet allows amateurs access to the thoughts of other amateurs and some academics who choose to participate. I obviously have not taken full advantage of the internet.
In a short article (Science, Vol. 220, pp 477) Lauren B. Resnick summarized some finding of cognitive scientists. “First, learners construct understanding. They do not simply mirror what they are told or what they read. Learners look for meaning and will try to find regularity and order in the events of the world, even in the absence of complete information. This means naive theories will always to be constructed as part of the learning process.” If you cannot find this article and are interested, I can type in the second and third summary. And she reports the problem that children begin to develop naive theories about the events of the world before they are taught the ‘correct’ theories. The importance of this observation is prehistoric adults could have done what it seems modern children naturally do.
Jerry