Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Stonehenge is a fascinating site, and if you haven't ever visited I encourage you to do so at a time (eg, Solstices, especially winter) or with a tour that allows you to venture inside and between the stones (standard visitors are restricted to a safe distance, which is not nearly as impressive).

I found (and have found, across a lot of physical sciences) incongruity in this piece between some mild slander of past amateur archaeologists without perspective for how primitive our technology will one day look.

To wit: In 1839 ... Captain Beamish dug out an estimated 400 cubic feet of soil...Beamish’s “big hole was probably the final blow for any prehistoric features...that once lay at Stonehenge’s center.”

Followed shortly by modern day expert Vince Gaffney "acknowledging that it will require digging—“the testimony of the spade”—to discover precisely what was there."

Magnetometers would have been an unimaginable possibility to Beamish. I can only assume that at some future point there will be technology unimaginable to Gaffney (and us all) that may render his "testimony of the spade" as cruel to Stonehenge's secrets as those we mock from the past.

This isn't specific to Stonehenge or Gaffney. I think we as humans tend towards a little modern day hubris - "Look at how they used to do things, terrible science, we're so much more protective of things." And then we shovel Stonehenge, slice up the Shroud of Turin[1], and discuss opening a 2,000 year old bottle of wine because that's the only way to find out what's inside [2].

[1] I'm less concerned about this, because it's a fraud. [2] http://www.thelocal.de/20111209/39405

I have to agree. Stonehenge is a special place. I proposed to my wife inside Stonehenge (at dawn on a Spring day, years ago) and now it is a very special place to me in particular. I know that no matter how successful any invention or startup I create is, that I will never make any person happier than I made her on that day.

Non-destructive testing/measurement methods have so many plusses that you'd wonder why they aren't mandatory in archeology. In addition to the obvious fact that a damaged site or article can't then be tested with better future technologies, non-destructive methods are more reliable (calibrations and measurements can be repeated). This is so much more of an issue in archeology than it is in say, laboratory biology, where if a sample is destroyed there is often the possibility of resampling. It is more analogous to crime scene investigation, where if you destroy the sample DNA with a bad PCR, you may destroy the entire possibility of using that evidence. Really, the only justification for not mandating non-destructive methods in archeology is that we can always imagine that there is a better future method than whatever we have now, so if we always wait for an uncertain future, no archeology will actually get done.

I think that this conflict means that there is a real opportunity for collaboration between archeological societies and funders and scientists/device manufacturers of non-destructive methods. By default, archeologists tend to use lots of grad students with shovels, because they are cheap and being a grad student with a shovel is a rite of passage in archeology. If non-destructive device manufacturers would help replace the student shovels with e.g. student Raman scattering devices, this might help spur more use of the non-destructive methods to the point where archeologists would look askance at anyone who used shovels without first using less destructive tools.

Just some thoughts; I'm not an archeologist. I have seen a similar change in tool use prompted by device manufacturers working with professional societies, though, in radiation therapy (is anyone in the developed world using Co-60 with conformal blocks anymore?).

> [1] I'm less concerned about this, because it's a fraud.

A fraud of what? It may not be the cloth in which Jesus was wrapped, but it's still very old nonetheless and certainly not a painting from the Middle Ages as some charlatans tried to portray it.

Good question: Claims that is is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ are fraudulent.

If its only 'claim to fame' was that it was a very old shroud or painting, then I would not make that claim (and, indeed, I doubt very much I would have heard of it).

> Good question: Claims that is is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ are fraudulent.

Maybe fraudulent is a little bit strong. The different analysis done (not the C14 one, which proved to be unreliable) indeed show it may be around 2000 years old or so. Now, we have no way of proving that the person who was wrapped in the Shroud is actually Jesus or not, while there are some similarities in the injuries described in the Bible and the blood stains locations on the Shroud. I think even the Church itself does not recognize it as being 100% authentic.

So, "we don't know", is probably close to the truth than "fraud".

Radiometric dating is very reliable. I would be interested in seeing this "different analysis". Can you provide a source please?

I saw a scholar conference about the subject a number of years ago, and they demonstrated that if you irradiate a piece of cloth you can completely distort the C14 readings (obviously). We don't know what printed the face on the Shroud of Thurin, but it's not paint because it's far thinner than what humans could even think of applying during the Middle Ages, so the "fake painting" hypothesis was ruled out since then. Furthermore, I think there were fabric analysis done to confirm that it was definitely something from about the Roman era in terms of quality and material.

I'll try to find some sources if you are interested in the subject.

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