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Littlestone L
Littlestone Nov 16, 2007 20:56:12
Replying to moss

Those at English Heritage have a responsibility to keep the public up-to-date (with at least weekly updates) on their progress at Silbury. Those updates should not only contain detailed information on the major issues of instability or the discovery of further voids but discuss less urgent (though equally important) issues such as the removal of the Atkinson/BBC door and lintel - an announcement on which could be made tomorrow if English Heritage so wished.*
Instead, those at English Heritage responsible for the Silbury conservation project have decide in their wisdom to now reduce their Silbury Updates from first weekly, to fortnightly and now monthly! They continue to avoid publishing their plans for the removal (or non-removal) of the Atkinson/BBC door and lintel and have announced (in passing) that they have laid a geo-electrical cable along the length of the Atkinson/BBC tunnel.** This cable hasn't been laid along the floor of the existing tunnel but into a newly cut trench that measures around a metre square. In removing original, untouched Neolithic building material from the heart of Silbury, English Heritage are yet again contravening accepted norms of conservation while not being completely transparent about the need to dig a new trench and lay a geo-electrical cable within it.

* http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=44274&message=558623

** http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/nav.17511 (Update 25).

E Etton
Etton Nov 17, 2007 20:31:56
Replying to Littlestone

I have read this thread with interest and have a few questions/points to put forward. Please don't see it as flaming - I'd like to have a mature discussion about it if anyone has any responses or problems with this post.

Have you considered that a lot of the material that falls through might be the old collapsed material that lies above the atkinson arches and occasionally falls through the sides?

If, as Pete says, the archaeologists have now left site and the engineers are taking over, why would there be weekly updates? All the updates I saw were clearly written by archaeologists. I'm sure the engineers have better things to do than take hours out of their already probably very long working days to write about the backfilling process? Might 'less variable' mean that because no archaeology is now going on, there is only one process left on site and that is backfilling. One might not expect an awful lot to be happening as they are no longer removing old material and sampling or recording, or having to deal with collapses and deformed arches to battle to the central voids.

Isn't the diagram in some of the updates, of the old tunnels and things, the detailed diagram of the extent of known voids up to now??

Thanks.