“...the problem was that in another era, the relatively few archaeologists knew each other well, visited each other’s digs and sometimes felt that was enough: in other words – despite what they said or even wrote into excavation manuals telling other people what to do – they felt no compelling duty to make the full results of their excavations available to everyone.

“Unfortunately Stonehenge was one of many sites to suffer in this way. As is now becoming well known, descriptions of important excavations there in the 1950s and 60s directed by Richard Atkinson, were until recently limited almost entirely to his popular book published in 1956..."

“The scale of the resultant misunderstandings resulting from this only began to become apparent with the publication of all 20th century excavations at Stonehenge in 1995... Amongst many problems, was the standard history of the monument, divided into three phases. This had been enshrined by Atkinson in the official guidebooks – but it was never openly debated by archaeologists, as only Atkinson had access to the evidence. We can now see that he built on ideas of his early colleague at Stonehenge, Stuart Piggott, and especially on the earlier excavations there by William Hawley: his book implied otherwise (and indeed had nothing but spleen for Hawley), but only a little that came from Atkinson’s excavations fundamentally informed the three phases into which the 1995 study tried to squeeze the full evidence.”

Mike Pitts writing in A really new stage in Stonehenge history?