In March 2018 the Council for British Archaeology announced it had commissioned a special feature issue of its magazine, British Archaeology, “to inform debate about the proposed A303 road tunnel at Stonehenge“.
The trouble is, it was written by the Editor, Mike Pitts, who no-one can be in any doubt is a strong supporter of the tunnel and whose conduct towards those who oppose it falls well short of the dignity the CBA might expect [“Tom Holland’s video … is manipulative and misleading“, the Stonehenge Alliance leaflet he held up “features misleading imagery worthy of Putin-supporting trolls” and Stonehenge Alliance itself looks like “the archaeological wing of Donald Trump’s social media campaign”.]
Against all that, there’s this: there is a complete absence of reporting in British Archaeology or any CBA Newsletter of the excellent case put at the Examination by George Lambrick for the CBA. This is really extraordinary, given the importance of the issue and the enormous amount of fine work done by George. Is British Archaeology the Magazine of the CBA or not? If it is, it should cover the CBA’s activities, especially the significant ones. It does so in a number of cases – but not Stonehenge – why?”
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21/10/2019 at 21:05
paulintheswimhotmailcom
To give balance the CBA ought to feature an article on the views of the large consortium of world-class archaeologists who oppose the scheme on a variety of grounds. The main ones being that the eastern tunnel-portal will seriously damage the nearly 10,000 year old hunter–gatherer site of Blick Mead. And the western tunnel-portal will do the same to what Mike Parker Pearson says is the “densest concentration of Neolithic longbarrows in the UK” which (if my memory serves me correctly) he described at the hearings as being “an area of absolutely enormous archaeological potential”.
If the tunnel (as planned at present) gets approval, then the world will have lost these two irreplaceable chances to find out why Stonehenge was built where it is.
Paul Gossage.