Maybe. But Mr Cope recognises there is sometimes great merit in silence - for when asked "What is the strangest experience you've had whilst out walking on the Ridgeway? "
he replied....
"If I answered this question honestly, I'd be ridiculed in the tabloids and gain an even higher profile in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner than I already have. "
and his reward is that he HAS been taken seriously and he was able to write....
"The Modern Antiquarian had a marvellous response from archaeologists, and I was asked to speak at Southhampton, Manchester, Aberdeen and Glasgow universities. Mark Gillings, who recently discovered the Beckhampton Avenue, asked me to sign his copy and said that they even teach my 'Silbury Game' at Leicester. Timothy Darvill, the editor of Antiquity and The Archaeologist, asked me to write for both magazines, and I'm now in constant contact with Aubrey Burl, who recently suggested that I write a book on Callanish. Ronald Hutton of Bristol University is the foremost scholar of pre-Christian Britain, and he called The Modern Antiquarian, "the best popular guide to Neolithic and Bronze Age sites for half a century."
So that's it. He deliberately kept away from stuff that might capsize his project and gained academic respect. Whereas his TMA website....
I can see it may be a case of 'needs must when the devil drives' in order for Cope to get his book out there, but to really change public perception about these matters we need 'brave' authors and publishers and people from the establishment (archaeologists, I suppose) to be 'bold' themselves and come onto places like this forum and engage in the discussion as it is in the real world, not avoid it because of their own fear of being 'labelled'.
I'm certainly not slagging Cope, and I can see his book contributing perhaps to a change by increment rather than a big revolution, but sweeping genuine experience under the rug and presenting a more 'acceptable' face of the alternative is just a little disappointing to my mind.
Having said that, elements of the essays in TMA are pretty out there and the comments above by people like Burl suggest exactly what I said earlier, that a lot of archaeologists became archaeologists because of their interest in the mysterious nature of the subject.
