nigelswift wrote:
I wish I believed that but I take the introduction of Advice No 2 "Works other than those of a minor nature are likely to be acceptable only where they would be in the best long-term......
Aye.. see your point of view. There's been an argument going on about this for a couple of decades now. A difficulty for the archaeological lobby (as opposed to the more general 'heritage') is that there hasn't been much work done on the value to taxpayers of preserve undiscovered remains ('Heritage' is almost a world away): S106 is an indirect form of societal taxation. So the recent planning relaxations could be argued to be a consequence of the somewhat philistine perception that, as a general rule, there are few benefits to archaeology.
But now that the 'archaeo 21' team have lodged an expert consortium-type argument for the Neolithic period using semi-value arguments, they are likely to get questioned on value and benefit (to try to bring their objections into the terms of reference of the consultation).
So Stonehenge is a huge opportunity to reverse the tide. They must have thought this through in a lot of detail before submitting (if they didn't have enough evidence, it could well set a far worse precedent than if they had done nothing at all).
So what comes next from them is likely to be seriously interesting. There are other submissions, but these aren't personal representations from the acknowledged world experts.
