Tara etc..

Weekend of weddings and festivities, so in the interim here’s the response from Margaret Gowen to the article published by Maggie Ronayne in the Irish Times recently and here’s the response from Maggie Ronayne and others…

And oh dear, here we go, Creationism/Intelligent Design – coming to school in a Province near you… it was inevitable that if Youth Defense didn’t come up with it the DUP would sooner or later….

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 3:19 pm. It is filed under About Archaeology and tagged with archaeology, Tara. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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4 Responses to “Tara etc..”

Alun says:

August 7, 2008 at 6:08 pm

Thanks for putting this up. I’ve deleted three drafts of comments because each time I’m about to submit a comment, I see that I’m not making sense.

The problem is I can’t see that Ronayne is making sense either because I really cannot recognise the problems she describes as being unique to commerical archaeology. There are some problems, but I don’t know of a university that has bottomless reserves of cash to fund digs. Compared to the alternative, which tends to be no excavation rather than excavation by academics working to higher principles, I don’t see professional units as inherently evil. You could even, if you were impish, spin it that commercial units are free to report a site isn’t that interesting while academics are pressured to publish positive results thus distorting the past for personal gain.

Presumably Ronayne has some passing familiarity with how commercial archaeology works and a quick trip to the BAJR forum would show her people working commercially in archaeology with a deep passion for the subject.

Of course they could have all been planted there by the US military for some vague and undefined reason 🙂
mooregroup says:

August 7, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Thanks for the comment Alun – have to go off to a pre-wedding event just now so don’t have time to give the whole thing the thought it deserves and am unlikely to be in any state to do so over the coming days. But it does concern me that all consultant archaeologists are being painted in this way.

In some ways we need to present our work better and communicate the results of all the great work thats been carried out in Ireland in a more proactive way. How we’ve become the enemies of the people and part of the global capitalist neo-con, new world order project is something I can’t quite figure out.
southiesham says:

August 8, 2008 at 3:53 am

Christ I must be getting old, but Mags wins this one hands down.

And Tennessee is indeed a scary place.
steve white says:

September 13, 2008 at 6:04 pm

first try to less condescending eh?