April 23rd. Harley to Chambers: "... .I am grateful to you
for your kindly rejoinder. Much that you say finds in me
a sympathetic response and willing agreement: for instance,
Harrison's "eoliths" and Reid-Moir's "rostrocarinates",
,.,,and it is difficult for me to reject all of these as
non-artifacts... .But, I think that what the orthodox
archaeologists are saying is that there is no way of
determining whether any individual example of eolith or
rostrocarinate was of human or natural origin in its
shaping, and there I think I must agree ....Again, I have
seen on Dartmoor, a standing stone, which if you sight
along its "chisel-edge" top brings another stone into view
and so on for three or four stones to a total distance of
over a mile. I think this was an undoubted guide to a safe
track, but need not have been Neolithic in origin, of course.
Where I reluctantly part company with Watkins....is that he
never fully probed the chances of alignment among random
points....(Had he done so) then he would have found, as I
have done, about as many alignments among truly random
spots as among the same number of ancient sites on the same
sized piece of paper as his map. Try it yourself, but
remember you have the considerable labour of checking all
the 1/2(50 x 49) = 1225 alignments resulting from 50 spots,
and these must be truly random....I now feel rather less
confident that there is any archaeological basis for his
undoubtedly ingenious theory. But, as I have constantly
said, the gathering of a considerable corpus of careful
observations can be by no means useless,....some day another
more acceptable explanation of the vast assemblage of
standing stones and mounds may be found",
May 4th. Chambers to Harley. "....I feel that the area of
difference between our respective viewpoints is so small
that,...with your leave, therefore, I sue for a truce. I
begin to feel that nobody really knows anything about the
remote past. People find artifacts, but what do we know
about the men who made and used them? There is a mass of
theories, which constitutes orthodox archaeology, and
another mass which is unorthodox archaeology, and who is
to say which is right?"
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