"However, had they not been taken and preserved, they'd be at the bottom of the North Sea by now."

But is that true? I see it very much as the excuse - the justification. Archaeologists tend to place greater value on increasing knowledge than in conservaion. They regularly destroy sites when excavating them. The oldtimers just dug a hole in a barrow looking for goodies. Now they raise a barrow to below ground level.

Seahenge wasn't removed to preserve it. It went off to Flag Fen but they didn't really want it after extracting all of its information. Pretty soon, several chunks of soggy wood were lookng for a home. No - it wasn't removed to conserve it. It was removed to study it and so that certain people could write papers, appear on TV and write books. Maisie Pryor just had to get every piece of timber up so that she could examine every tool mark. And what conclusion did she reach from that? She found that 51 different axe heads had been used so deduced that 51 different people had worked on the wood. Common sense would suggest that this was unlikely. Surely bronze axe heads got blunt and would need re-sharpeing and even re-casting. Is it not possible that fewer people each used several axes? And so what? - does that information really matter and does it really compensate for the loss of a unique monument?

The destruction of Seahenge was like watching teeth being extracted. It was so emotional and distressing.