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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't say that the TV crew surreptitiously discovered the hole.

It's just as likely that archeologists unaffiliated with BBC came up with this theory months or even years earlier, wanted funding and a bit of publicity for their pet project, got hooked up with BBC, and scheduled the most important part of the excavation to coincide with the arrival of the TV crew as per the funding agreement. The whole point is to maximize the likelihood that an interesting discovery will take place during filming. NatGeo does this all the time, and I'm sure BBC does, too.

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Yeah some info: (from https://www.irishmirror.ie/tv/extraordinary-stonehenge-disco...)

Professor Mike says he had long held the theory that the smaller bluestones which surrounded Stonehenge in a wide circle during its earliest phase, had started life as a monument in Wales.

But finding the site of a stone circle which no longer exists, 5,000 years after it was moved, is no mean feat.

The research started in 2010, with excavations beginning in 2012 but as they years went by they experienced many set-backs involving bronze and iron age circles which weren’t what they were looking for.

Mike, 63, did a deal with a TV company to film their progress in 2015.

Two years later, it was a despondent group led by Dave Shaw, who decided to excavate Waun Mawn, an “unpromising” marshy site described as “small and unremarkable” which had turned up nothing in the geophysics surveys.

... [goes on to describe finding it]

I'm finding this whole comment thread a bit hard to read, because this is at least the third Stonehenge special Mike Pearson has done with the BBC at this point, not to mention plenty of appearances on Time Team.

You're pretty spot on - this is a well-known archaeologist with an established record as a television presenter. From what I remember of the previous Stonehenge specials, the filming process appeared to be: academic research team does the excavation for a few months, camera crew comes in when a "big moment" is expected, and also films a rollup where the researchers talk over exciting discoveries made in the past months while they're there. They've been digging near Stonehenge and on associated sites along the river for years and years.

> surreptitiously

serendipitously?

Uh, yeah. I wonder what kind of typo triggered an autocorrect into that word...

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