Savages and howling barbarians​…

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moss M
moss Jan 13, 2011 10:50:20
Replying to Sanctuary

Sanctuary wrote:
When I was a member of the Southampton based group WATSUP (Wessex Association for The Study of Unexplained Phenomena) I had the great honour as a young man of meeting and speaking to Professor Atkinson on a field trip we made to Avebury and he presented me with a drawing he scrawled out on a piece of paper of the construction of Silbury Hill as he saw it during his excavation.

To speak to he was most humerous and witty. I also remember him saying the builders of Silbury would have 'stank' as there was no deoderant in those days.
This is his obituary
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/obituary-professor-richard-atkinson-1443428.html

For what it is worth I think he was a great man of his time.

Atkinson though committed the great crime of not publishing the results of his excavations, on two very important sites, namely Stonehenge and Silbury, for which he has been lambasted by archaeologists such as Mike Pitts, even in the obituary, Aldhouse-Green says....

"and with many important excavations unpublished - Atkinson turned his great energies from practical archaeology to administration."

The only book Atkinson published on Stonehenge was a populist book for easy reading.

N nigelswift
nigelswift Jan 13, 2011 11:28:49
Replying to moss

moss wrote:
Atkinson though committed the great crime of not publishing the results of his excavations, on two very important sites, namely Stonehenge and Silbury, for which he has been lambasted .
Absolutely. Failure to do that was a terrible thing, certainly by the 1960s. It's the act of a right selfish monkey if you ask me and there's no "hindsight" defence.

Mind you, he does embody the principle that official "Truth" is politicised and changes when convenient. EH said not a word against him for decades (as to do so would be to criticise their predecessor organisation I suppose) and then suddenly about ten years ago they (four of them) laid into him in British Archaeology in the run up to the Silbury dig (better the predecessor organisation was seen as at fault at that stage I suppose).

As I heard it (once removed) from one of the last surviving Atkinson Silbury diggers they were left to their own devices entirely during the tunnel filling phase and didn't see an archeo for weeks on end and didn't even try to fill it fully. At one point, allegedly, they ripped some of the timber lining down and had a bonfire inside the tunnel. So we can stick that (alleged) negligence onto his charge sheet next to the non-publishing one.

S StoneGloves
StoneGloves Jan 13, 2011 11:35:01
Replying to moss

Atkinson's book on Stonehenge isn't all that bad. I might still have it somewhere.